Canada has been slow to the driverless car revolution

[A Google driverless car/Reuters]

The driverless car revolution is taking the world by storm, but Canada has been slow to join. Only one Canadian province, Ontario, has allowed autonomous cars to be tested on its roads.

And with several major automakers and even tech companies like Google developing or researching driverless cars, Canada’s sluggish take to autonomous vehicles might make it hard for the country to profit off what could be a booming industry and for consumers to take advantage of a technology that may transform everyday life.

”When I look at the G7, Canada is last, dead last, in terms of getting ready for and taking advantage of driverless vehicles,” Barrie Kirk, executive director of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence (CAVCOE), tells Yahoo Canada News. “I see a lot more activity in Europe, Asia and in the U.S. I think there is a huge potential here for Canada to get involved.”

Autonomous vehicles typically use a combination of various technologies, including GPS and an assortment of sensors, to scan the environment and send that information to the computers on board that direct the cars where to go. These types of vehicles have already shown up on roads in some countries overseas.

In Europe, for example, you can already buy commercial nearly fully autonomous electric shuttle buses that operate at low speeds, and two different European companies have already moved on to their second generation.

Although driverless cars might take a while to make it to Canadian roads, autonomous vehicles have shown up in limited capacity in Canada. The Alberta oilsands currently has autonomous heavy-haulers in use, and much of the technology you would find in driverless cars are used in those trucks.

While autonomous vehicles may work in the oilsands, that technology can’t simply be transferred to a car because there are many more complexities that are introduced when you consider everyday driving in the city. Heavy-haulers in the oilsands don’t have kids running across the street to catch a ball as cars might face. City cars also have to obey traffic lights and stay in lanes. With snow and rain as factors, too, getting the car’s sensors to pick up where the lanes are may be problematic. That’s not to mention that driverless cars might have trouble picking up signals from police directing traffic should traffic lights malfunction.

Despite some of the flaws in driverless car technology and that many places in Canada haven’t approved fully autonomous cars for their roads, that hasn’t stopped traditional automobile manufactures from including some of this technology in their cars. There are cars with features like parking assist, autonomous emergency braking and adaptive cruise control. Perhaps the most notable vehicle out there with this technology is the Tesla Model S, which can be nearly fully autonomous with automatic speed, steering, lane changing and parking.

However, ready or not, the first fully autonomous car might make its way on the world stage before Canada is all on board with driverless cars, which may be sooner than you think.

“Mercedes S-Class, Toyota and others, they’re all moving towards semi-autonomous, and they’re going to keep adding more and more features until they’re fully autonomous,” Kirk says. “And my prediction is that the first fully autonomous vehicles will be in showrooms for consumers to buy in 2020.”

When they arrive in full force, expect several industries to be disrupted. As driverless cars are expected to be safer than human-driven cars, the insurance industry may be hit hard. We may even be able to use driverless cars to drive our kids to school. Once the technology makes its way to tractor-trailers, truck drivers may also be impacted. The taxi industry, currently suffering from ride-hailing services like Uber, may face another big blow when driverless cars arrive too as Uber and Lyft have already shown interest in self-driving cars.

“One of the things I think when I look at TV or the newspapers at the pictures of the conflict and tension between taxi drivers and Uber drivers. I think to myself in a few short years both camps will be on the same side protesting Uber’s use of self-driving taxis,” Kirk says.

We may become reliant on driverless cars and in time may unlearn how to drive, too, which may make human-driven cars even less safe than they are now.

“Is it ethical for governments to allow humans to keep on driving?” Kirk asks. “What point in time do we ban human drivers because they’re such bad drivers?”

Today, as the automobile industry and tech companies fight to bring the first fully autonomous car to the market largely with Canada out of the mix so far, it isn’t too late for Canada to take a significant role in the development of autonomous cars, experts say. There is already some testing that has been done on driverless cars in Canada, albeit limited.

Professor Steven Waslander and his WAVE Lab at the University of Waterloo have tested four autonomous vehicles with a Silicon Valley company called Nuvation Engineering for about four years. As Ontario only recently allowed testing of driverless cars on its roads, their tests were done with vehicles at one-fifth of their regular size but without many of the factors that traditional vehicles face like traffic. They have hopes of being part of a strong driverless car research environment in Canada.

“We’re not leading yet, but we have one of the best public education systems, so we can really train a lot of people to work in this fascinating area,” Waslander says.

Real-world testing isn’t the only way Canadian companies can take part in the driverless car revolution. These cars take a lot of code to work, and even if we don’t attract the type of real-world autonomous vehicle tests done in places like California, software is another way Silicon Valley North can pitch in.

“I hope that [Canadian companies] will take advantage of those opportunities to sell hardware and software in this huge global market,” Kirk says. “I think there’s a role for government, federally and provincially, to help see that activity, and a lot of things that happen in the technology field do benefit from seed investments from governments.”

As for who might use that technology and bring the first autonomous cars to the world, it’s a toss up between the traditional automobile industry and tech companies like Google.

“I think the automotive guys are really in for a run here. You see some really interesting players coming into the automotive space and that have never been there before. These are the tech giants,” Waslander says. “These players have phenomenal skills in an area that the automotive industry are not very strong in and in a piece of the tech that’s going to be really important going forward.”