Fleet Auto News caught up with the new CEO at ORIX, Reggie Cabal, and asked about the new role and the last 12 months.
FAN: What is TARS and what are its key goals?
Ann: TARS is a small research centre and it’s independently funded by groups such as the road authorities or companies. We have been very successful in attracting funding. We dream up the projects. We do high quality research and we engage with the community.
FAN: What are you presently working on?
Ann: Probably the biggest one at the moment is we are the lead (researcher) on a naturalistic driving study. There hasn’t been anything quite like this before. In the study, we are putting instruments which look at how a person drives in their own cars.
We don’t know an awful lot about how people drive, for example, how fast they take corners. There’s a whole range of things we are monitoring. We have instruments in 360 cars; mine was the first when the project started in March. We will finish the data collection phase by the end of this year. Others involved in the project include Monash University, Queensland University of Technology and Adelaide University, as well as road authorities in Qld, Victoria and SA.
FAN: Can you tell us if you think Google’s plan to have a fully autonomous vehicle on the road by 2020 is achievable or too ambitious?
Ann: It’s not achievable. It’s way too ambitious.
FAN: What are the major stumbling blocks to getting there?
Ann: The major one is the technology. It isn’t sophisticated enough to be realistic and really replace a driver where the driver doesn’t have to do anything but just sit there and read the paper.
Think about the technology that we already have in our cars, like reverse and forward sensors. They can be more of an annoyance than of assistance. I turn my car on and it starts beeping even if I’m not in reverse. My husband’s car has forward sensors and he’s stationary in the supermarket carpark and this thing is going off.
If manufacturers aren’t paying enough attention to those what you might think are minor things, then those are the warning signs. We put up with a lot of very poor design in our vehicles. A lot of errors a driver makes are actually made because of the vehicle the driver is in or the roads are hard to interpret.
FAN: How long have you been involved in road safety?
Ann: I came from a workplace health and safety research background. In about 1990, I got involved in one of the first projects looking at fatigue in trucking. Fleet managers would understand the people they are looking after are actually working while they are driving.
FAN: If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you would do to reduce the road toll in Australia?
Ann: I would definitely start looking more at how you make the road system more compatible with how you use it. I would put people at the heart and work out from there — how we design vehicles, the road system and road laws to take into account how people use them. Before you say let’s develop driver-assist technologies, ask, what do people need? Look at road rules: dropping the speed may not be the way to solve a problem.A lot of road authorities don’t want to hear this, but one way to make cycles more safe is to separate cyclists from fast-moving vehicles. If we can see there’s going to be an incompatibility, that it’s going to be hard to get people to do what you want them to, then we need to rethink it.
FAN: How can the fleet management industry drive improved safety standards?
Ann: They are a buying force and if they say, “You are putting in all these gizmos just to have the gizmo and not because it is actually going to help out my drivers, so I won ‘t buy it,” they will be influential. Fleet managers definitely have a role because they can demand better.
