Autonomous vehicles

The autonomous vehicle(AV) industry is the next market that will create major disruption. Removing the driver from vehicles changes everything about how people move around and even where they live. AVs will deliver people faster, safer, and with significantly reduced carbon emissions. This opens the possibilities for all the benefits of owning a car without the costs. No more insurance, gas, maintenance, parking lots will turn into parks, traffic fines- gone! Parking lots and garages are estimated at $9.5 billion, traffic fines estimated to be $5 billion, and parking tickets from 16 cities was $1.5 billion. While much of this revenue goes to the cities that collect those fines, surely we can do better than rely on income from penalized behavior.

When I envision AVs, films like iRobot (2004), and Minority Report (2002) come to mind. There are so many hurdles from here to the end vision, but instead of saying “it can’t be done”, or “it’s too hard”, I prefer to keep the goal on the horizon and aim the helm for the next stop in the goal.