Toronto, Ontario — April 6, 2017 — The Conference Board of Canada has announced it will hold a conference on autonomous vehicles (AVs) on April 19 and 20 in Toronto, Ontario. This is the second such conference to take place in Canada.
Collision Repair magazine provided extensive coverage of the first conference held in 2016. One of the speakers was Barrie Kirk of the Canadian Automated Vehicle Centre of Excellence (CAVCOE). At the time, Kirk noted that the adoption of these vehicles will be driven largely by safety concerns.
“That’s the single biggest issue here, safety. My hope is we can save 80 percent of those injuries,” said Kirk at the time. However, he also noted that there will still be collisions, even with AVs. “There is no such thing as a crashproof car. Seven percent of accidents will happen whether a computer or a human is driving,” said Kirk.
The Automated Vehicles 2017 conference will take place at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto. Planned speakers include Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister of Transport; Jennifer Keesmaat, Chief Planner and Executive Director, Planning, City of Toronto; Grant Courville, Senior Director, Product Management, BlackBerry; Raphaël Gindrat, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, BestMile and Lisa Salsberg, Director of Regional Planning for Metrolinx.
The conference is sponsored by ARUP, CAA, CAVCOE, the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers (CITE) and Pacific West Transportation Limited. The full conference schedule is available at conferenceboard.ca/conf/vehicles/agenda.aspx.
