Today I will be discussing the possibility, or in my view, probability that in the future almost no private individuals will own or drive their own vehicles. Instead what I will be suggesting is how regulators and large scale corporations may change the way people drive all together. I will go through the steps many companies have already taken to get towards this future, the plausibility of the idea and possible ways lawmakers could possibly enforce this.

​

The way that almost all cars/vehicles are driven right now has been the same for many decades. A driver controlling a vehicle that they own (or effectively own aka on credit). The way that lawmakers have decided to regulate the safety of this is by requiring anyone who drives to take a driving test and to be a driving license holder. This means that anyone who is driving is competent and deemed safe to be on the road.

​

Many people work as drivers in various capacities, such as: truck drivers, takeaway drivers, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, coach drivers and etc. These people all contribute significantly to our everyday life and there are a lot of people that do this skilled work.

​

As there is a lot of people that work as drivers in some capacity, that is a lot of wages being paid. This is a direct incentive for large scale corporations to autotomize driving and even if there was serious scale research and development funding, it probably wouldn’t take long for businesses on a large scale to save a considerable amount of money.

​

Alongside the workforce behind driving, the potentially larger market is individual drivers. As has been the way in the last couple of years, more and more industries are moving to a subscription based payment model instead of an upfront purchase. This is because there is a constant stream of revenue. It would be very possible once autonomous driving has become wider stream, a company could on a large scale purchase or lease autonomous vehicles from a manufacturer and then on a subscription basis charge the end user for being driven everywhere they go.

​

The company could even adjust the feature set of the vehicles by software. For example, as a base model you get a standard vehicle but for extra you could choose to add Air-conditioning or heated seats. This is a similar method that is already widely used for other forms of transport such as trains or aircraft.

​

There is signs from large scale organisations that autonomous driving will become part of our everyday life. Tesla currently spends around $1.5bn per year on research and development from around $830m in 2016 (Statista, 2020). Tesla spends a large amount of its R&D budget on autonomous driving and the markets have been responding to this quite well with the tesla stock price hitting its all-time high of $901 on February 21st. Compared to the same point last year which was $294 (MarketWatch, 2020). Not only that, but as of 2019 the current autonomous driving market size is $54bn and this is expected to grow to $556bn by 2026 (Allied Market Research, 2019). All these factors point that many of the big players believe the potential scale could be huge.

​

According to BusinessInsider’s top list of causes of vehicle crashes, the top 4 are all related to human error and would be near impossible for these things to occur whilst being driven autonomously. This is provided that the technology has matured enough and the tech is reliable. Therefore once autonomous driving has become more of a main stream idea, it is actually very plausible that politicians will want to stop humans driving all together. And, they have a point.

​

According to BusinessInsider’s top list of causes of vehicle crashes, the top 4 are all related to human error and would be near impossible for these things to occur whilst being driven autonomously. This is provided that the technology has matured enough and the tech is reliable. Therefore once autonomous driving has become more of a main stream idea, it is actually very plausible that politicians will want to stop humans driving all together. And, they have a point.

​

Whilst this isn’t necessarily human error, if vehicles were driven autonomously, they would be able to alert the central system and cars could come to a safe stop, before even a single car crashes due to the original accident.

​

​