Ethical Risk: Pandemic Fighting Automobiles

January 20, 2021 by David Nitkin | Categories: Trends Forecasts and Outlooks | Tags: design for disassembly, safety No Comments ↓

The Issue

This blog addresses three questions:

Could self-driving vehicles be an answer to helping reduce risk of COVID-19 infection or preventing future pandemics?
Can cars be engineered to enhance immunity inside and outside the vehicle cabin—that is, function as a virus-fighting product?
Is the auto industry in the process of being transformed from one based on making and selling mechanical products to a services-based digital mobility platform?

Footprint of Auto Industry:

In the past two generations, car safety has been a constantly changing, consumer-driven (bottom-up), social responsibility issue. This includes reform efforts in the crash-worthiness, Unsafe At Any Speed movement in the 1950s, and the fuel economy crusade of the 1970s, and waste emission reduction movement in the 1990s. Recent literature on this theme is addressing a new normal “safety” issue— vehicle systems and products that might actively protect against air-borne viruses and bacteria, and that clean the air inside and surrounding a vehicle.

Cars can convey a sense of freedom and movement, not to mention style and status. More recently, their design and sale have been challenged by changing societal notions about the value of ownership (rent rather than own preferences), ride sharing, concern over pandemic infection risk, waste minimization (the need for design for disassembly), and climate change. These legacy practices and concerns have a big impact on the planet.

Here are a few key themes to consider about the impacts of the automobile:

Environmental Impact of Production: Cars consume a lot of energy before they ever make it to the open road. Automotive production leaves a giant footprint because materials like steel, rubber, glass, plastics, paints, and many more must be created before a new ride is ready to roll.
Environmental Waste: Plastics, toxic battery acids, and other products may stay in the environment for a long time. Fortunately, junkyard pile-ups are becoming much smaller than they were in the past. About three-quarters of today’s average car, including the bulk of a steel frame, can be and are being recycled.
Fuel Consumption Drives Global Warming: Production, recycling, and disposal costs to the environment are difficult to quantify but very much under the control of most consumers. Most of an automobile’s environmental impact, perhaps 80 to 90 percent, will be due to fuel consumption and emissions of air pollution and greenhouse gases that climate scientists say are driving global warming.
Compromise Air Quality: Vehicles are North America’s biggest air quality compromisers, producing about one-third of all air pollution. The smog, carbon monoxide, and other toxins emitted by vehicles are especially troubling because they exit tailpipes at street level, where we humans breathe the polluted air directly into our lungs.
Massive infrastructure requirements: Cars require building of highways and roads, and this contributes to emissions, sprawl, land expropriation, and wildlife decimation. This is not easily addressed or fully solved by technological advancements like fuel efficiency, transit, and electric propulsion.

The pandemic is helping reshape the definition of socially-responsible auto-making. As noted in EthicScan blogs, COVID Adaptation Scenarios in the Auto Industry (July 2) and Radically Remaking The Future of the Automobile Industry Post-COVID (November 5), the auto industry is ripe for disruption as New Wave digital companies like Waymo, Google, Baidu and Tesla do “life and death” battle with traditional manufacturers like General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen. Mergers or absolute takeovers between Old Wave and New Wave companies are in the air.

During the pandemic, the auto is being seen by many travellers in North America, Europe and China as the safest (from a low personal contact infection perspective) and most readily available mode of travel. According to industry engineers, the ways that autos can be engineered to protect passengers from COVID include:

Protect individual drivers with in-vehicle technical enhancements
Protect fleet drivers: driverless rideshares
Offer self-driving or driverless car
Offer a proactive pandemic minimization or virus fighting car.

Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles

According to industry experts, autonomous, self-driving or driverless vehicles (AVs) have the potential to:

(a) minimize human error;
(b) reduce our carbon footprint;
(c) act as a defense in the fight against a pandemic;
(d) slow the spread of an infectious disease, and
(e) support social distancing and contactless delivery efforts when needed.

Infection control and production experts comment:

Self-driving or AV technology is currently really nowhere near being able to actually ferry passengers around without having a human in the driver’s seat ready to intervene to prevent catastrophe.
Most of the vehicles being researched and tested are electric.
The AV market is becoming more diversified and less driven by the scale of the auto industry as a whole, at least as far as delivering SAE Levels 4 and 5.
The coronavirus pandemic is definitely affecting the progress of the development of AVs because creating and testing these vehicles still involves people, and right now those workers are subject to strict social distancing measures. In fact, many driverless companies have responded to the COVID-19 crisis with restrictions on testing and operations.

Bacteria And Virus Protecting Vehicles: A Healthier Car

Tesla is launching a new version of its HEPA air filtration with Bioweapon Defense Mode as an aftermarket upgrade for older Model S and Model X vehicles. (Source)

Bacteria and virus-protecting vehicles (BVPVs) are built upon new systems and devices to regulate cabin air quality, including offering the potential to:

(a) protect occupants from viruses, plague and bacteria; and
(b) purify the air and filter out viruses.

Technologies to make this happen include:

(a) advanced filtration air treatment systems;
(b) antibacterial materials throughout the car especially for frequently touched surfaces like buttons and handles;
(c) more environmentally sustainable materials; and
(d) other devices designed to protect against a variety of dangerous particulates, including some pathogens.

The industry’s early “healthier car” standard involves an HEPA filtration system capable of stripping the outside air of pollen, bacteria, and pollution before they enter the cabin and then systematically scrubbing the air inside the cabin to eliminate any trace of these particles. HEPA as a filtration system is said to be hundreds of times more efficient than standard automotive filters, capable of providing the driver and passengers with the best possible cabin air quality no matter what is happening in the environment around them.

Public health experts commenting on BVPVs note:

Experts writing in trade publications disagree about whether or not in-car filtration systems can protect against a virus like COVID-19.
It is possible for an in-car system to block the coronavirus, provided the vehicle is outfitted with a HEPA filter and “all the air that goes into the car goes through it” (according to scientists and virologists at Laval University).
No automobile cabin air filter can prevent one passenger from transmitting a virus to another.
Some systems will, it is claimed, protect you from bacterial agents like anthrax or plague, while you sit protected in your “second home”—your car.

Manufacturer or Supplier	Vehicle Type			R&D Locations	BVPV Device or System
Manufacturer or Supplier	AV	BVPV	FLEET	R&D Locations	BVPV Device or System
Ford		X (1)		China	Auto Air Refresh
Geely	X	X		Europe, USA, China
General Motors	X			USA, Europe
Google	X (4)			USA
Tesla	X	X (2)		USA, Europe, China	Bioweapon Defence Mode
Toyota	X			Japan
Volkswagen	X (3)			Germany
Volvo		X		Sweden, China	Advanced Air Cleaner Option
Yanfeng		X		China	Wellness Pod

Source: EthicScan
(1) Lincoln (2) Tesla model X and S (3) Audi (4) Waymo

Geely‘s R&D involves new environmentally sustainable materials with anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties which can be used within air-conditioner systems and on frequently touched surfaces such as buttons and handles. Tesla uses a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter which it claims is “100 times more effective than premium automotive filters” as it removes “at least 99.97% of fine particulate matter and gaseous pollutants, as well as bacteria, viruses, pollen and mold spores.” Tesla says its Bioweapon Defense Mode” system can remove particles as small as 0.3 micrometers out of the air. Shanghai-based auto supplier Yanfeng has a Wellness Pod console that is an “antimicrobial device” mounted inside a vehicle that emits UV light, sanitizes vehicle interior air and surfaces with UV light, while bringing in the latest in scent dispensing technology. Volvo’s system, aimed at various pollutants and allergens, is equipped with an ionizer that puts an electric charge on particles as small as 2.5 microns coming into the car, causing them to stick to the air filter, with sensors measuring cabin air quality and posting results on the car’s center-stack screen.

Air filtration systems are being tested in real-world environments such as California freeways during rush hour, major cities in China, and smelly marshes, landfills, and cow pastures in the central valley of California. Developers want to ensure systems capture fine particulate matter and gaseous pollutants, as well as bacteria, viruses, pollen and mold spores. Volvo, Lincoln and Tesla are rolling out advanced air filtration systems for 2021 models. Whereas Tesla’s system uses HEPA filtration, first rolled out in 2015, those offered for the first time next year by Volvo and Lincoln do not.

Robo-Taxis: Fleet Autonomy

Personal ride sharing and ride hailing services need to assure customers that cars are clean. A fleet of driver-less, robotic vehicles could shuttle people without coronavirus symptoms to the store or transport ill patients to get medical attention without risking a driver’s infection, which in turn spares not only the driver’s family, but also all subsequent riders a driver would have interacted with throughout the day. With proper cleaning practices, driver-less ride shares could protect both drivers and riders.

Some public health experts say that driver-less robo-taxis are desirable for consumers because there will be no human in the front seat (or potentially any front seat at all) to spread viruses or germs. Experts comment:

Robo-taxis have long been put forward as the solution most appropriate for autonomy but progress certainly will be slow.
Full autonomy will likely be pushed into more business-facing uses like mining, logistics, warehouse operations, and other places where there’s a good mix of needs and the potential for efficiency and cost savings.
While ride share companies like Uber and Lyft are taking measures to protect their drivers during the COVID-19 pandemic, these workers are still exposing themselves to the possibility of contracting and transmitting the virus. For an industry where one company, Uber, completed an average of 14 million trips per day, the impact could be significant.

Conclusion

Growing attention and investment is being devoted to developing and applying technology to:

(a) help the world defeat the current pandemic;
(b) aid asthma, allergy, smog, and pollution sufferers;
(c) offer self-driving cars that can reduce infection rate risks; and
(d) affect the health and safety of many citizens during natural and man-made disasters, including chemical, forest fire, or toxic environmental outbreaks.

Technical challenges notwithstanding, automakers see profit in introducing new systems to regulate cabin air quality, betting that pandemic-weary consumers are now paying more attention to the issue.

Need More Answers?

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Further EthicScan Resources

EthicScan Blog – Radically Remaking The Future of the Automobile Industry:
http://ethicscan.ca/blog/2020/11/05/radically-remaking-the-future-of-the-automobile-industry-post-covid/ ###

EthicScan Blog – COVID Adaptation Scenarios in the Auto Industry:
http://ethicscan.ca/blog/2020/07/02/covid-adaptation-scenarios-auto-industry/ ###

### comments and scenario analysis in Knowledgebase