The autonomous car and the end of the automobile

It’s not the ecologists who dream of it. It’s not the urban planners who say that. It is the automobile industry itself which predicts that there will be fewer cars on the road within 25 years, and that it is therefore rather pointless to build new roads until then.

Even before the pandemic, major automakers thinking about their future identified their most threatening rivals as Uber and Airbnb. Companies that sell transportation and accommodation without selling vehicles and buildings.

A service business can generally earn better margins than a commodity or natural resource business.

Five years ago, we thought that the electric and autonomous car would be the basis of this shift towards an automobile industry that would build fewer vehicles, and which would sell them as an autonomous and shared vehicle service that their customers would not have. than hailing from their smartphone to hit the road.

Five years and a pandemic later, electrification is officially underway. Experts predict that electric vehicles will become more popular than gasoline vehicles everywhere on the planet somewhere between 2035 and 2040. Some will get there before others. Quebec, for example. Canada, perhaps, if a change of government does not cause a jackknifing of federal electrification targets.

For now, the Canadian oil and auto industries are getting along pretty well. But that could change when car manufacturers’ environmental obligations push them away from gas stations.

Level 3

The pandemic has put a serious damper on self-driving cars. For two years, we barely heard anything about it. Another major problem, last year, autonomous taxis belonging to a subsidiary of General Motors caused accidents which forced the American group to rethink its ambitions in this area.

It was still possible to come across several robotic taxis last week, in the streets of Las Vegas, during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). And not just from one company. Nevada and California allow Level 3 vehicles to operate on their roads. Autonomous driving comes in five levels, and level 3 is where the driver can take their hands off the wheel and read emails while their car makes road decisions for them.

This is precisely what senior executives from automobile brands suggested that future buyers of their semi-autonomous vehicles do during CES: empty your email inbox, join a Zoom meeting, play a video game on the central dashboard screen.

This is a huge level of confidence in this technology for automakers who generally take very little risk. Especially since another facet of level 3 autonomous vehicles is that they transfer civil liability to the manufacturer in the event of an accident. It is no longer the person behind the wheel who must present their insurance paper, it is the manufacturer who will have to assume the consequences if their autopilot tears off a fire hydrant.

What pushes them to act is that there is a commercial strategy behind this shift: people in their cars who no longer have to concentrate on the road become captive customers. We can more easily sell them connected entertainment, teleworking tools and other tailor-made services.

Billions

“Would you like a little cappuccino?” There’s just a café on your route, I’ll order it! ”, will launch the generative artificial intelligence of your car on the way to the office. Everybody wins !

This is a fictitious example of the connected services of tomorrow that we heard from good sources at CES. We’ll probably see more during the Montreal Auto Show next week.

Because manufacturers already have financial objectives for the services sold on board their cars. The Franco-Italian-American giant Stellantis, for example, hopes to raise 20 billion euros by 2030 with its embedded services.

And the better things go, the more these services will be numerous. Until a first manufacturer decided to completely replace the sale of automobiles with an autonomous car service. An Uber 2.0.

This will have advantages, the first being that these vehicles will not spend 90% of their useful life parked in their owners’ driveways. Always on the move, these vehicles will take up much less space in the city and elsewhere. We can replace parking spaces, if not entire roads, with parks, terraces or flower boxes.

This future is for the moment pure fiction. But it fuels reflection in the automotive sector. All the elements are gradually falling into place for it to become reality.

While waiting for ransomware to cause a widespread breakdown of robo-taxis…

To watch on video


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