Sunny Side Up: The future of autonomous vehicles in Florida

Driverless cars will fundamentally reshape the way our cities and economies function. As vehicles become increasingly shared, electric and autonomous, Florida is leading the way in embracing this change.

“Any one of these trends would be enough to transform the transportation industry,” said State Senator Jeff Brandes. “The simple truth is that you’re having a convergence of these three things all at the same time.”

That convergence is opening up a new market in autonomous transportation. Unlike the traditional market that used cars sold as a metric, with shared and autonomous vehicles, a new market would run on miles traveled. That change would increase transportation market value from $1.5 trillion to $10 trillion.

These themes were at the forefront of the latest edition of the Sunny Side Up Lecture Series, held Thursday at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg’s Kate Tiedemann College of Business. St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership’s Jason Mathis led a panel of experts, including Brandes, Starsky Robotics’ Kam Simmons and Voyage’s Dean Bushey, in a discussion on driverless technology deployment. Here are the major takeaways.

The Florida legislature is leading the nation

Brandes has been talking about driverless technology since he took office in 2012. Nothing short of a trailblazer, Brandes was willing to set a course for policy to embrace driverless technology and win over his colleagues in the legislature in the process. It all started with a TED Talk. Brandes stumbled upon Sebastian Thrun’s talk on Google’s self-driving car project, reached out to Google, and began “the first legislator-led conversation at the state level on self-driving cars.”

Autonomous deployment for retirement populations

Autonomous vehicle technology is already being deployed in Florida – but not where you might expect. Voyage, a startup out of Silicon Valley, whose mission is to provide transportation to underserved areas, picked central Florida’s retirement community The Villages to deploy its second generation vehicles. Voyage’s fleet of Chrysler Pacifica hybrids utilizes LiDAR (remote sensing  that uses lasers to collect measurements and create 3D models and maps) technology to determine its routes.

Bushey says that The Villages served as the perfect deployment spot for Voyage’s driverless technology, due to the slower paced environment of a retirement community, the climate, and the state’s political and economic friendliness to new technologies. Similarly, Bushey said that those who have given up driving themselves increasingly understand the need for and the convenience of driverless technology.

Autonomous technology will disrupt entire industries

Driverless technology won’t just have implications for consumers, but for entire industries. Starsky Robotics, another startup out of Silicon Valley, is focused on long haul trucking. The trucking industry is facing an unprecedented shortage. A study by the American Trucking Associations found that the United States will be 175,000 drivers short by 2026. With upwards of 68 percent of freight moved by U.S. highway systems, this could have major implications for the U.S. economy. Starsky Robotics is creating driverless trucking technology that is autonomous on the highway. For safety, they employ remote operators to control the trucks for the first and last miles of the trip.

Cities are still 5-10 years from everyday implementation

Driverless technology has made a lot of headway in the last decade, but implementation is taking longer than anticipated. The panelists agreed that driverless technology’s implementation in an every day capacity (especially within a city) is still 5-10 years down the road. In the meantime, companies are focusing on areas of easiest implementation with less complicating factors: retirement communities, rural areas and highways.