Autonomous Vehicle Transport & You — look ‘no hands’!
Your life is about to change in ways you wouldn’t think possible…welcome to the second great inflection point in mobility.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — attributed to Henry Ford.
The year is 2035, your alarm rings at 6.30 am and its Wednesday morning. You’ve worked from home over the last two months, and with Gloria from the Singapore hub in the country, you’ve arranged to meet at the London work space and catch up on project development in person ahead of your client presentation this afternoon.
You get showered, dressed, wake the kids up and say goodbye to your family. Oh, and before walking out, you make a quick check on your kitchen monitor on timing for today’s groceries delivery, just as an alert pings up on how far away your ride is from your building - five minutes away, and your coffee order is confirmed along with a croissant and fruit. All to be found in the food pod of the flexi-desk space you selected for your 2 hour commute in the Robo+ taxi ride you booked last night.
With a minute to spare your Robo+ finds you waiting outside, there’s six others already inside fixed on their pullout desk space screens (using these helps to prevent motion sickness rather than using laptop or personal pad screens) and working away at their desk space. You spot your neighbour Jeff from down the road already sat down.
You slide into your desk space, and glance at the digital display on the Robo+ windscreen, which says it will be a wet and windy morning (thankfully you’ve got your umbrella). The Robo+ doors slide shut and before you settle down, you check that the food pod beneath your desk space is unlocked allowing you to dispense your coffee and pick up your fruit and croissant. You then spend the next two hours reviewing the business plan Jim sent you last night and adding finishing touches to this afternoon’s presentation. The work day has began.
What we’ve described above will be typical in the Level 5 self-drive and autonomous world of mobility that’s less than a decade away from being commercially realised on our roads. Level 5 vehicles are described as completely self-driving and autonomous. The driver does not have to be in control at all during travel (in fact there is no driver), and this vehicle can handle any road condition and type of weather.
The above ‘Robo+’ example (made up concept name) did not have a driver, offers a commuter working station and catering service and does not depend on any app or credit card tap in mechanism to unlock (that’s the beauty of the decentralised and blockchain based payment solutions that will be common place). And all you needed to do to book your morning ‘ride’ is add it onto your phone calendar, select your preferences (i.e. work deskspace and breakfast) and payments and car selection are all managed by your network provider.
This is a future where more of us will be working from home, and so ‘the office’ (will sound as silly as saying ‘the factory floor’ today), isn’t somewhere we will commute to on a daily basis (hence why you live 2 hours away from the regional capital city in the above example), but will be made up of hubs and flexible work spaces where colleagues can agree to meet at whenever needed. Car passenger transport therefore becomes not only a tool to get me from point A to B, but an amenity where I work, sleep, read, meet and stay productive as I travel.
However, we’re under no illusions that the infrastructure to truly allow the above still has a long way to catch up. Despite this though, industry reports such as those from McKinsey still highlight that “multi-passenger robo-taxis could account for 500 billion miles traveled on US roads — about 9 percent of the total — by 2030. By 2040, they could account for 50 percent of all miles traveled.”
The impact of this electric, autonomous mobility solution will be HUGE as it converges with other emerging technologies i.e. increased renewable energy generation (people still do not fully appreciate the power of the zero marginal cost that solar and wind will offer over decades to come); changing work trends of less commuting and more remote working; expansion of computing power; 5G related data generation and data management through sensors and cameras; virtually free data storage; and decentralised payment solutions across machines without the reliance on humans.
Think of it this way: vehicle emissions will plunge; traffic congestion will decline due to less cars on the road (don’t believe us, 2020 could very well mark the third year of consecutive decline in global car production); petrol stations in their current form will disappear; under-utilised parking spaces will be redeveloped into other uses e.g. for housing; auto insurance will no longer be needed or will have to adapt massively (think what happens to UK insurers like Admiral, Direct Line and Aviva when their nearly 10 million insurance plan customers start to rapidly disappear); the next frontier of retail will emerge moving away from order-driven ecommerce and delivery based services to mobile on-demand supply chain operating models (best picture of this can be seen today from in-flight services where on a flight you can order anything from a coffee, beer, sandwich, breakfast, to a brand new Rolex watch); the opportunities for independent travel by many who currently cannot do so unsupervised e.g. children, elderly and disabled; and the cheapest form of transport we’ve ever seen as pricing goes from a ‘cost per journey’ model to a truly ‘cost per mile’ one. This is significant considering autonomous vehicles are expected to drive well over 100,000 miles annually (average NY taxi is 70,000 miles) and do this without any driver costs to factor in, i.e. the cost per mile will be considerably lower!
We are by no means claiming to know what the future holds, and I suspect we may still fall within the ‘give me a faster horse’ camp despite how far we have pushed the boat in our description. But the above is meant to start painting a picture of the reality that may unfold. And hopefully as we go on this journey, we can all prepare our minds, social patterns and attitudes to what we believe is a really exciting age to come.
