Self-driving cars are being tested in many cities and yes, the one in San Francisco ran a red light. There’s still a long way to go until we see an important percentage of cars without a driver taking people from A to B. This won’t just impact transportation workers, but insurance services, the parking system and especially car ownership. There is still no clear timeline for when this will start to be a main concern for the automotive sector, but better safe than sorry.
Transportation Business
This is probably the most obvious of the three, but it will come with mass effects. Transportation and retail sector make up for a big piece of the graphic pie of the labor market. Taxi drivers, bus drivers and probably similar positions in both sea and sky will eventually be replaced by AI as well. Uber is leading the race, but the rest of the companies are preparing for the shift. Electric cars haven’t kicked in yet and we are already on our way to self-driving transportation.
Insurance services
On the paper, the change should not be a big deal: instead of have a driver get an insurance, the owner company of the car will be considered as “the driver”. But this is not as easy. How will the insurance companies start including the self-driving cars? What will their premiums look like? Will they need to get algorithm experts to evaluate them?
There can be collisions between AI driven cars and human driven cars, which will be generating most of the controversy. The new technology will be developing for many years and learning all the alternative situations imaginable until perfection is achieved. As for the AI — AI collisions they will happen on a decreasing trend and the communication between cars will get more and more efficient. It will be something amazing to see.
Car Ownership
As we are heading to the shift in proportions of ownership/services, cars seem to be leading the changes. Car pooling and car sharing services have been with us for a long time now, but they are becoming more important to lots of people. We have seen the peak of car ownership, and can already perceive the downhill of it. Why spend a lot of money on a car, insurance, expenses, parking, when with just a few taps on the screen of your smartphone you can have access to a car service? Some might just love having a car (and enough money to maintain one) or they use it everyday. But for many people, a car is just a complement. This is the big target of the beginning of this new era.
A car is without a doubt one of the worst investments to make: the moment you take them out of the dealership they’ve lost a fair share of their value. The more you use them, the more value they lose and the more likely to have a technical issue. Then the insurance premium, taxes, fuel and parking. You need the technical inspection and change the oil and the tires every certain amount of time.
With self-driving cars, we’ll see the change in the cities: a fraction of the current cars will be transporting the same amount of people in a more efficient way. No worries about parking, less pollution and lower expenses for lower usage. If you have to go to work, you can just enter your destination on your phone (or whatever we may have in 15–20 years) and a self-driving car will pick you up. It will be efficient and people will be able to join other people’s convenient rides for lower fares. The number of cars parked on the streets for long periods of time will be zero and the traffic will be smooth. Cars will be coming and going from centralised parking lots outside the main areas, and will be deployed according to demand. Again, we will see a big challenge for companies to come up with new business models. But don’t worry car lovers, some company will make sure to build circuit tracks to allow the joy of a great drive.
-- I previously wrote this article in my Medium profile, here's the link: https://medium.com/@jaimepichardogarcia/the-downfall-of-car-ownership-2765fe336c3c --