martinjlm
Retired from GM
âSelfiesâ, if we wanna call âem that, will be here, no doubt. The capability is already there. Some of them exist already. Regulations have not caught up to the technology, so getting them certified for public road use is a big impediment. But the âhow toâ and âhow muchâ have already been defined, so that will be solved.There are only two factors that need to be overcome for selfies. One is the tech and the other cost. The tech like any other tech is moving at light speed. There is a very strong desire to get them on the road. The biggest factor is greed. There is so much money to be made with selling and then "renting" them. The cost to produce them is higher than a human driven car, but that is changing and it will accelerate. Just like the computer industry did, so will autonomous cars. I really think in the next 10 years they will work out the tech needed to make them safe and maybe another 10 to make them cheaper than human driven cars. There will be many already on the road by then. Our kids and their kids will be much less tied to wanting to own and drive a car and more open to letting them be driven around while fiddling on whatever a phone is at that point. Not sure what symposium you were at and who the manufacturer was, but they probably won't be a car manufacturer 20 years from now if they stay with their shortsighted views. Maybe they are talking that way as a strategy with their competitors to try to make them think they are not a player. Anyway time will tell and I do agree it will take a while.
What I am saying is that âselfiesâ will coexist with ICE vehicles for a very long time. The symposium was sponsored by Schaeffler. Along with Bosch and Continental, one of the biggest suppliers to the auto industry. Much of the hardware that would have to go into electric vehicles will come from those three suppliers, so for one of them to say itâs gonna be a long time before EVs become a dominant product in the market is telling.
If someone passed a law today to say that all vehicles have to be self-driving and human driven cars would be banned, the industry could not get there for decades. Letâs roll the numbers. The Global automotive market is approaching 100 million new vehicles a year. The US is around 17 million of that. So letâs just look at the US. Every manufacturer who builds and or imports vehicles into the US would have to convert their manufacturing from producing human driven vehicles to producing selfies. Given that the time to bring a new vehicles program from drawing board to street is somewhere between 3 to 4 years, every manufacturer would either have to start now to develop all new selfies to completely replace their US portfolios, or stagger the development of all their programs. GM has about 10 - 11 platforms. Even if they did two a year, every year, the first ones wouldnât hit until 2022 and they wouldnât finish rolling them out until about 2027. All of that is a BIG IF. Somebody would have to force GM to do that. Now add For, FCA, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc to that big ball of forced transition. Suppliers would not be able to keep up with all the requirements from all the automakers, so that 3 - 4 year turnaround per architecture will stretch out to more like 5 or 6. Thatâs assuming all the engineering and validation happens on time for every program and every assembly plant gets converted with no hiccups or delays (looking at you GT500). Now, thatâs just the 17 million new vehicles that enter the market every year. Hereâs the kicker....what do you do about all the vehicles already on the road that are not self driving? They would have to be replaced by something. Weâre talking 268.8 million vehicles registered in the US in 2016 (latest year for available data). It would take decades of incremental volume above the 15 - 17 million a year normal new car demand to address replacing the vehicles that are already on the road. Ten years would mean an additional 26.8 million vehicles per year. Ainât happeninâ. Twenty years would mean an additional 13.4 million. Ainât happeninâ.
Hybrids were supposed to take over the automotive landscape. Despite the fact that you canât sneeze in LA without spraying snot on a Prius, hybrids still only amount to something less than 10% of new vehicles sold in the US every year, 21 years after the Prius first came to market.
Selfies are coming, but the spread of them will be a lot slower than the amount of press coverage they receive would have you believe.
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