Driver-less cars could severely hit multi-car households: Study

21 May 2015

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Shared driver-less cars could ring the death knell of the multi-car household, says Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, who projects a grim future for Detroit.

According to Johnson, driver-less cars would drive down US auto sales by 40 per cent over the next 25 years, forcing GM and Ford to cut back on their output, Bloomberg reported.

According to Johnson's report, ''Disruptive Mobility'' the number of cars on US roads would fall below 100 million (down around 60 per cent), with the annual sales slumping to 9.5 million (a fall of around 40 per cent from today's levels.

Johnson does not assume that US citizens would give up on owning cars completely – though, families would have no need to own more than one car, as they would be able to whistle up a trip from an autonomous car service.

Driver-less cars would ferry people around throughout the day instead of being parked and waiting for their owner to return.

Every shared vehicle on the road would displace nine traditional autos, and each pooled shared vehicle would take the place of as many as 18, says Johnson's report.

According to his projections, GM would need to cut 68 per cent of its North American production while the output at Ford would fall by 58 per cent.

The Barclays report shares much of the findings of researchers Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

According to Boston Consulting Group report in April, 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.

By 2017, partially autonomous vehicles will become available in ''large numbers,'' the firm said in a report in April.

According to data from the government's National Household Travel Survey, Schoettle and Sivak discovered that families with three or more vehicles in the garage or driveway did not use more than one at a time normally.

They also fund that more than four of every five households (84 per cent) did not have any trips that overlapped or conflicted on a typical day. In only 2 per cent of those households were there enough overlapping trips to require three or more vehicles.

According to Barclays' Jonhson, self-driving cars would travel many more miles than personally-owned vehicles as they would be used throughout the day for multiple trips.

"Intelligent and connected technologies hold tremendous potential to enhance driver safety and convenience, and they will create new mobility options for many drivers," said GM spokesman Jim Cain.

"We are not going to speculate about future sales. We've looked over the horizon and contemplated how technology may change the market. Our designers, scientists and engineers are working at the cutting edge, and we're confident GM will be very successful."

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