THE BIRTH OF ROBOTAXIS (CAR-AS-A-SERVICE)
How would your life improve if you never had to drive again? If traveling across town to work or your friend’s home was cheap and fully autonomous, enabled by a robotic chauffeur?
How much time would you save if you weren’t the one behind the wheel? What would you do with those extra hours?
Over the next few blogs in this Age of Abundance series, we’ll discuss an additional category of advanced robotics, namely autonomous vehicles, flying cars or eVTOLs (electric Vertical Take-off or Landing), and delivery robots helping to get people and goods from one point to another.
Fully autonomous vehicles from Tesla and Waymo (to name a few) are on the path to enable “car-as-a-service” fleets (or robotaxis) operating on-demand, Uber-like services.
The cost of ground transportation is slated to decrease between 2x to 4x as a result. Sometime in the near future, your kids or elderly parents will never drive.
A significant percentage of parking garages, driveways, and parking structures will eventually be transformed into alternative usable space. Autonomous cars will take all shapes and sizes and serve as functional “third spaces” used for entertainment, sleeping, or meeting rooms as drive time becomes work or play time.
Meanwhile, aerial ridesharing, eVTOLs, and flying cars will also become fully operational in most major metropolitan cities this next decade.
Where you live and work will begin to transform as these systems shrink travel time and distance. Previously difficult to reach geographies (islands, rural areas, mountain tops) will become accessible.
Individuals seeking the solitude of the country will also have access to the shopping, food, and entertainment of metropolitan city centers, connected through eVTOL technology.
In today’s blog, we’ll go back in time to the early 2000s, when a series of Grand Challenges laid the foundation for today’s autonomous vehicle industry.
Source:
https://www.diamandis.com/blog/abundance-46-birth-of-robotaxis
