When Electric Cars & Automated Driving Come Together

In a book I worked on several years ago, we talked about how different innovations can come together to deliver entirely different experiences.  When you combine health care diagnostics and remote monitoring, you don't just get remote monitoring, you get peace of mind for patients.  When you combine two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen, you don't get three atoms of gas, you get wet.

And so it will be when electric cars and self-driving cars come together.  

Electric cars are only just emerging in the market, but they already look different from traditional cars in a number of ways.  To start with, they're a lot simpler.  With fewer moving parts, they're easier to make.  They also use more off-the-shelf parts.  Those changes are already upsetting the established order - letting companies like Tesla into an industry dominated by oversized bureaucracies.  (Link)

Self driving cars are on the way in the near future as well.  The New York Times has a big article about Google's further experiments in this area, And they look promising (link).  Google's cars are driving themselves through the bay area, in traffic, on freeways, and even on side streets with pedestrians, all quite safely.  And what's exceptional today will, thanks to Moore's law, be common place in the not too distant future.

Google's Car, Photo from the  New York Times article linked.

Self driving cars could have a big impact on society - less congestion on the freeways, fewer cars, and greater productivity as people can finally text & drive at the same time.  Oh it's a miracle.

And as the two technologies emerge at the same time, it could completely change society and the automotive industry.  Today, people buy cars and they care about performance.  But if you're not driving the car, why do you care about performance?  If your acceleration and braking are set by the computer, who cares what the 0-60 performance is?

People may stop buying their own cars, choosing to rent them buy the mile.  And once that happens, concerns about the distance that can be covered by electric cars may disappear.  Need to go on a long trip? You can just rent a gasoline car instead.  That could transform rental car companies into the real power brokers, erasing the traditional direct sale of cars to dealers and on to end customers.  Given the reduced complexity of electric cars, they might as well just source them from a big contract manufacturer rather than a traditional OEM.

Self driving cars could reshape our physical landscape as well - leading to a massive new round of urban sprawl and transport consumption.  If you don't have to drive, why worry about how long the commute is?  You can be on the phone the whole way.  If you don't have to take the kids around between soccer and after school activities yourself, why worry about how many trips are involved?

It may all seem quite farfetched today, but the future can arrive quickly and suddenly.  In my experience, it usually arrives long after futurists expect it to and just before incumbents think they are ready for the transition.