Experts believe that we'll stop driving cars in twenty years. We'll do other things inside the vehicle while it drives us without any effort. That means an important revolution in the automotive sector, which have to innovate in order to keep their costumers.
7 september 2016
The automotive sector seems to be on the verge of the perfect storm, at least, that is what wise people say. Some of the most distinguished analysts of the sector anticipate their virtual disappearance such as we know it today. It is a sector that has barely changed in its one hundred years of history that, apparently, is going to be completely transformed in the next twenty years.
According to their thesis, the irruption of the autonomous and electric car in an environment where collaborative economy is increasingly winning space will completely change the car’s industry. And the numbers, on paper, sustain this approach. The use of vehicles nowadays is 4%, that is, over the 90% of the time they are not being used. With regard to sharing a car, a phenomenon that is growing every day, the use of vehicles could reach levels of 20-25% if this becomes usual. Today we use 400,000 million hours per year driving, so it is evident that when cars are drove on their own, drivers will have more free time in their journeys.
Taken to the extreme, this approach holds that cars, as means of transport, will become utilities and that the differences between brands will be determined by the content, that is, the distractions that each model provides. We will not buy any more cars due to their technical features or their exterior design, since they all will tend to converge. A vehicle of such characteristics will become, also, a forth screen to attack the consumer, a reality that the Silicon Valley companies have already seen. For that reason, they are entering in the sector as a bull in a china shop. Ultimately, they are autonomous cars where you can do things inside, things that we cannot yet imagine; something completely revolutionary for the sector.
Without doubt that can happen, but it it’s hard to believe that that transformation comes overnight and that traditional automotive companies are not capable of adapting to the news technological challenges.
The original piece was published at ABC newspaper and the blog EL Quinto en Discordia.
