IEEE Future Directions
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An important impact of autonomous vehicles is in the area of jobs. Although new jobs will become available to manage the radically different environment, the amount of jobs that will be lost because of the fading need for a driver will be very high. Along with the loss of “drivers” jobs there will be loss of jobs in advertisement of vehicles, only marginally compensated by the advertisment of Mobility as a Service, related Services and Pods, loss of jobs in the insurance market, in the management of infrastructures and vehicles (both will be simpler to maintain), of road police, in vehicles manufacturing (fewer vehicles, each with fewer components, hence impacting the whole value chain)….
The first signs will be felt in long haul goods transport, trucking, followed by taxi drivers. In the next decade the expectation is to see a loss of 25,000 jobs a month in the US (with truck drivers being hit most in the first part of the next decade). That means 300,000 jobs lost per year just in the US with a total of 4.5 million jobs fading away in the coming 15 years in the US.
Manufacturing of vehicles is likely to feel the heat starting in the second half of the next decade, although real impact will not occur before 2030 and beyond with full impact taking place in the 2040-2050 period as combustion engines will be fading out.
As in several technology disrupton we are likely to see a snowball pattern, slow in the beginning, then ramping up and once a thresholds is reached an avalanche. In this area that will happen when the ownership of car will be no more cost effective: it does not happen when newer forms of transportation get cheaper but when scrapping the old ones for the new ones becomes advantageous. Clearly that will first happen in the business sectors (like taki, trucking) but eventually it will happen in the mass market with private vehicles.
In this latter, an important factor will be the time for a cultural changing, moving from ownersip to use of a service. This is a huge step, from a cultural point of view, as individuals are very much tied to the idea of ownership.
Yet, we have seen the success (although in niches) of multiproperty vacation clubs, shared ownership, and similar proposition where the “seller” is leveraging on the lower cost plus the ownership feeling (even though there is no longer a real ownership, just the access to a service). This might be a business model that in some cases may take root in some niches, like providing refined transportation (sold like travel in style, in luxury pods). It will remain to be seen since in the Mobility as a Service volume is crucial and creation of niches may not go hand in hand with reaching the required economy of scale.
