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The MobilityX conference kicks off in Dublin this week, before decamping to Achill Island, at the invitation of Mayo County Council, for a series of TED-Talk-style lectures and seminars.
The purpose of the conference is to try and bring the cream of the robotic car tech industry to Ireland, and show them just what a dandy place Ireland is for investment and research when it comes to autonomy. With Jaguar Land Rover and Valeo already having autonomous car research centres here, MobilityX might just have a point.
Philip McNamara is a vice president of Voxpro, the company that has organised MobilityX, and he told CompleteCar.ie that Ireland is an ideal test market for autonomous cars. "When you're stuck on the M50 going two miles in half an hour, complete autonomy is what you want. You don't want to be concentrating on stopping and starting all the time" he said.
"So I think 99 per cent of the time that we're driving, it's in very boring situations where we'd all be happy for a computer to take over. There will always be those times, maybe when you're out on the Wild Atlantic Way, when you want to take the wheel and enjoy the drive, enjoy the roads, but most driving is about A to B, home to work or school, and it's about teaching people that these cars are safe. I think it really does come down to safety. So I think definitely Irish drivers will be open towards it, not least because of the possible impact on insurance prices."
Key speakers at the conference include James Taylor of BMW ReachNow; Bobby Hambrick, CEO of AutonomouStuff; Barry Lunn, CEO of Arralis, and Peter Barry, Chief Software Architect of Jaguar Land Rover. The discussions ranged from the use of artificial intelligence in autonomous control, to vehicle-to-cloud and vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and on to the ways in which car sharing might work, and the infrastructural needs of autonomous cars.
Ahead of the conference's move to Achill, where it will continue until the 13th, Mr McNamara said: "I'm delighted that today's conference included so many exciting speakers from home and abroad. We find ourselves at a crucial point in the development of self-driving technology and Ireland offers great possibilities for the progress of the industry. With new advancements all the time, events such as the MobilityX Conference offer a great opportunity for discussion and networking for those looking to gain insight into how future transportation is about to drastically change."