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Cars, the future is today

more than 4 years ago during a long walk between Burgos and Santiago de Compostela a conversation took place between my father and me.  The topic was the likely advent of autonomous vehicles.  I told my father that the first self-driving car would emerge in 5 years, my father thought that 10 years was a minimum!  Imagine our surprise as we walked out “of the woods” that Tesla had just announced the launch of its first "level 2" self-driving car — which still means substantial supervision by the driver.

Last week the LAPD arrested a man in his Tesla 3 who was fast asleep at the wheel of his car.  Again a very dangerous situation since the level 3 technology still require substantial driver supervision.

Then again this morning Waymo announced that it is launching, in Phoenix for nearly public use, its autonomous taxi; and that if everything goes according to plan, the fleet of autonomous taxis will be available for use by the general public early in 2019.

This is the revolution; because autonomous taxi are the gateway to autonomous cars everywhere (taxi generally work in the city).  If you think the GM restructuring was a big thing, or that the soon to be announced Ford restructuring (they took the provisions but have not announced what would be shut down), the implication is that the demand for vehicles is about to drop dramatically.

First to go will be the second car, used to either go to the office (or the nearby mass transit station), granted in the city it will not change much, but autonomous cars spell the end of parking garages in places like Manhattan.  Then how long till the "ownership" of a car become thing of the past? 

Most commuters drive between 40 and 75 minutes every day.  The rest of the day the car is parked unused.  How about repurposing such vehicle so that they are used maybe another 3-4 hours a day.  The implication is that the number of vehicle required in the US could drop from -- 40% to 80% (in the worse case scenario).

That means that car manufacturing plants (there are already far too many) could see a dramatic reducing in overall usage.  We are talking million of jobs here.

This has the potential for being a major shift in consumer paterns --


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