BCAA

WINTER 2017 BCA A .COM 5 your BCAA Shom Sen President & CEO M y first car was a Fiat Spyder convertible. It was beautiful; cream with a red leather interior and a wooden steering wheel. There was only one problem: it had a finicky starter that only ever seemed to work on rainy days – not ideal for a convertible in a place like Vancouver! All my life I have loved driving. The freedom of the road has always been a passion and it has brought my family together. Road trips are some of my family's best shared memories. The journey was half the fun: discovering quaint towns with lots of history or stumbling upon beautiful natural settings, and of course finding interesting diners and restaurants along the way. The world is changing rapidly and with it, how we get around. We will always need and want to be mobile and use mobility to make our lives easier and better. This is a huge focus of ours at BCAA. Recognizing that driving habits are changing as cities, generations and technologies evolve, we want to ensure BCAA is not simply along for the ride, but firmly in the driver's seat. In 2015, we launched Evo Car Share, allowing drivers to get around Vancouver without owning a car. Today, we are working with local tech developers to further evolve tomorrow's Evo experience. That's just one part of our future in mobility. When I think ahead, I see a growing variety of interconnected options – car share, bike share, public transit, autonomous vehicles and more. BCAA will play a major role, as a provider of services and a source of objective information; for example, data on the relative safety of autonomous vehicles based on testing. For those who don't yet know much about autonomous vehicles (AVs), also called driverless vehicles: AVs detect their The Future of Mobility: BCAA Will Be There surroundings using technology such as radar, GPS and computer vision. Some are programmed to conduct specific manoeuvres, like parallel parking and emergency braking, while others are programmed to fully operate themselves in traffic without human interaction. We're in the early days, but live tests of fully driverless vehicles on public roadways have received much attention and get us thinking about the possibilities to come. In a Canadian Automobile Association study earlier this year, Canadians had mixed views about AVs. The majority saw benefits, such as improved accessibility for people with mobility challenges, reduced driver stress and fatigue, improved safety from removing the possibility of human error – the cause of most accidents – and more leisure time during commutes. Concerns include unclear accountability in an accident, potential technology issues and mistrust of AV driving technology. Many said they always plan to drive and own a car. The love of getting behind the wheel is deep-seated in our life experiences. The majority of those in the study see driverless technology becoming mainstream in five to 10 years. Whenever that future arrives, I think those family road trips will look very different. The one thing I do know is that BCAA will be part of that future landscape and the transition to it, guiding you down life's many roads. BCAA President and CEO Shom Sen's first car, a Fiat Spyder.

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