Driverless Buses

Driverless Buses

Blue Ocean Strategy

Low costs approaches and differentiation strategy are pursued concurrently as a way of opening up or expand current market spaces and establish new demand opportunities in the blue ocean approach. The strategy is all about carving out a niche for a business in a crowded market and eliminating the competitors in the process (Agnihotri, 2016). It is predicated on the idea that the actions and opinions of industry actors may reshape market limits and industry structure. It focuses on creating uncontested new spaces in the market, renders rivalry irrelevant, captures or creates new demand, the value-cost trade off is broken, and aligns the entire system of the activities of a firm in the pursuit of low cost and differentiation.

Driverless Bus Blue Ocean Strategy

Buses that can run without a driver or teleoperation control are known as autonomous/driverless buses. Due to their novelty and movement away from traditional structures, the current transportation business model may be fundamentally altered (Kim, Yang, & Kim, 2008). Though autonomous buses appear to be a long way off, their improvements and imminent arrival are becoming increasingly apparent. A paradigm shift is expected in the next several years (Antonialli et al., 2017), as the automobile industry undergoes fundamental changes and seeks to locate itself in the right place. In this sense, self-driving buses are a part of the most significant historical transformation in society, economy, autos, and public transit in history. In the current blue ocean strategy, these driverless buses are pitted against the traditional/regular buses that confirm to traditional driving rules involving human control in almost every element of the transportation sector.

Common Trends of Competitors that the Blue Ocean Strategy is Moving Away From

The blue ocean strategy that the driverless bus concept is adapting aims to move away from traditional transportation models involving teleoperations and conductors. In the automotive sector, regular vehicles, especially buses, are in a saturated market. Regular cars are monitored by humans in all aspects of their existence. Their platform has not been altered significantly for the last century, apart from the recent introduction of fully-electric vehicles. In a sense, this is also not a major change. These regular buses require human support at all times. Regular buses require external elements including radio controls and so on. These regular buses are exposed to human error and improper response to physical hazards. Because a majority of road accidents are blamed on human carelessness (Hancock, Nourbakhsh, & Stewart, 2019), driverless buses aim to eliminate this problem. With the help of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, driverless buses will improve on the regular buses ideation from concept to implementation on the roads. For example, a bus shuttle used in a crowded area has to compete with other buses on the basis of human speed and other huma-led factors. However, an autonomous bus would be full reliant on in-built programming to ensure effectiveness, efficiency, and safety limits.

However, the regular buses have some notable positive elements over the driverless bus. For example, it is easier to control ticket payments for regular buses, there is a person to address issues that may arise during use, there are individuals on board to assume responsibility and authority in case of passenger or vehicle-related issues, and the role of the driver as a provider of information is retained. The blue ocean strategy pursued in the case of driverless buses aims to mitigate the disadvantages by focusing on the potential to increase punctuality and reliability, potential to minimize staff costs, potential to raise the investments in a multiplier effect (Rodriguez, 2020), and flexibility for altered timetables and routes because the schedules are not reliant o human drivers.

Factors of Competition for the Transport Industry

The most important factors affecting the competitiveness of companies in the road transportation sector are transportation costs and prices, service quality, flexibility and adaptation to customer needs, company organizational potential, human resources, safety, transportation fleet and modern technology (Ainsalu et al., 2018). However, the most prioritized factors from a business and consumer perspective include security and safety, technological compliance, user acceptance, costs, and adherence to modern regulations, legal issues and policies.

The factors to RAISE beyond the industry standards are in the value innovation comprising of buyer value and cost. Cost savings will be made through the elimination and reduction of the factors that the transportation sector competes upon. The buyer value will be lifted through creating and raising elements of the industry that have not been offered before. Factors to reduce include human resources through stand by drivers and conductors because they have high costs and will provide little profit and almost no competitive advantages (Zhang et al., 2019). Factors to eliminate include waiting times on bus stops because they are taken for granted by customers and removing the wait time will add more benefits in the long run. New factors to create include online booking options and cancelation options to add value to the current customers.

Conclusion

Future autonomous buses have the potential to improve security, reduce traffic congestion, boost fuel efficiency, and save time for both passengers and operators. There have been several research conducted on the adoption of driverless buses, and the results of these studies have revealed that entirely autonomous buses will be accessible in the near future. It will take another 30 years or more before these technologies are generally accepted by the general public, to put things in perspective. In this report, low costs approaches and differentiation strategy are pursued concurrently as a way of opening up or expand current market spaces and establish new demand opportunities in the blue ocean approach. The strategy is all about carving out a niche for a business in a crowded market and eliminating the competitors in the process. The blue ocean strategy that the driverless bus concept is adapting aims to move away from traditional transportation models involving teleoperations and conductors. The driverless concept is seen as the future of the transport industry. It will not only reduce competition but also render it irrelevant as people move and accept new technologies.

References

Agnihotri, A. (2016). Extending boundaries of blue ocean strategy. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 24(6), 519-528.

Ainsalu, J., Arffman, V., Bellone, M., Ellner, M., Haapamäki, T., Haavisto, N., … & Åman, M. (2018). State of the art of automated buses. Sustainability, 10(9), 3118.

Antonialli, F., Cavazza, B. H., Gandia, R. M., Nicolaï, I., de Miranda Neto, A., Sugano, J. Y., & Zambalde, A. L. (2017, September). Autonomous Vehicles, are they “riding” in a Blue Ocean?. In 12th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship ECIE 2017 (p. 31).

Hancock, P. A., Nourbakhsh, I., & Stewart, J. (2019). On the future of transportation in an era of automated and autonomous vehicles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(16), 7684-7691.

Kim, C., Yang, K. H., & Kim, J. (2008). A strategy for third-party logistics systems: A case analysis using the blue ocean strategy. Omega, 36(4), 522-534.

Rodriguez, R. (2020). Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Transportation Sector. Journal of Technology & Governance, 1(1).

Zhang, W., Jenelius, E., & Badia, H. (2019). Efficiency of semi-autonomous and fully autonomous bus services in trunk-and-branches networks. Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2019.