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Barclays PLC analyst Brian Johnson predicts that U.S. automobile sales will drop 40% within the next 25 years due to disruption caused by driverless technology, and that vehicle ownership rates will be cut in half as families move to having just one car:
Large-volume automakers "would need to shrink dramatically to survive," Johnson wrote. "GM and Ford would need to reduce North American production by up to 68 percent and 58 percent, respectively."
Self-driving cars have become a frequent topic for auto executives as the technology for the vehicles emerges. The market for autonomous technology will grow to $42 billion by 2025 and self-driving cars may account for a quarter of global auto sales by 2035, according to Boston Consulting Group. By 2017, partially autonomous vehicles will become available in "large numbers," the firm said in a report in April.
Johnson's report, entitled "Disruptive Mobility," contends that the shift to cars that drive themselves will upend the auto industry. "While extreme, a historical precedent exists," Johnson wrote. "Horses once filled the many roles that cars fill today, but as the automobile came along, the population of horses dropped sharply."
"By removing the driver from the equation (the largest cost in a taxi ride), the average cost per mile to the consumer could be 44 cents for a private ride in a standard sedan and 8 cents for a shared ride in a two-seater," Johnson wrote, noting that would be "well below" the $3 to $3.50 a mile consumers now pay to ride in an UberX car or the $1 to $1.50 a mile for an UberPool vehicle.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Thursday May 21 2015, @06:29PM
You know, I was going to call you out on statistics abuse, but you understated your case. Current census numbers [census.gov] indicate that nationwide the average children per family is 0.9; this only goes up to 1.86 when you filter out the families with no children. (see table ST-F1-2000)
I have to wonder how many standard deviations 3 children is out from that mean. The CIA factbook still lists US fertility rate at 2.01 children per woman, [cia.gov] so we're keeping the birthrate up somehow despite the numerous families w/o children and the many with fewer than 2.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @09:03PM
A family that has/will-have/has-had n children, where n≥1, could go through 5 states:
Of course there's other sources/sinks (e.g. adoption and death), and even without them there's the possibility that the last child is born after the first child leaves (1 -> 2/4 -> 5), but I think the full sequence should be typical for n≥2. Note that for n=1, they go through states 1 -> 3 -> 5, skipping 2 and 4.
One might expect the average number of children for families in state 3 to correspond closely to the fertility rate (assuming low child mortality, and few permanently childless families) -- but if you consider all families with children in an attempt to estimate fertility rate, you're (correctly) dropping families presently in states 1 and 5, but including families in states 2 and 4, who have less than a full complement of children, thus underestimating fertility rate. OTOH, you're also (incorrectly) dropping families who never have children, which would lead to overestimating the fertility rate -- evidently the former effect is larger than the latter.