Change vehicles: How robo-taxis and shuttles will reinvent mobility

Uncertainties surround the future of shared autonomous vehicles. Modeling scenarios for their development and adoption can help companies on the road ahead.

 
Modern cities feature an odd mix of excitement, opportunity—and pain. Much of the latter results from getting around: sitting in traffic congestion, hunting for parking spaces, breathing exhaust emissions.

 
Understanding cities’ problems with private cars

All cities, to a greater or lesser extent, have a problem with private cars. As an example, let’s look at Los Angeles. Today, it suffers from congestion that leads to an increase in travel time of 44 minutes per day, or 170 hours per year, that are lost for every driver, making it the most congested city in the United States and Western Europe. The city also aims to address car-related safety issues that it wants to solve with its “Vision Zero” target to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2025. Furthermore, public-transportation usage in Los Angeles is low compared with car-based mobility; additionally, Los Angeles, like most other cities, faces emission problems, heading the list of most polluted US cities regarding ozone.

These challenges result largely from today’s mobility situation. As in nearly all major cities in the world, private-car usage dominates LA’s mobility mix, accounting for about 80 percent of all passenger miles traveled in Los Angeles County. Public transportation handles only about 5 percent, while the stake of shared mobility is below 1 percent today. However, there’s accelerating adoption of shared mobility in particular, driven by the rise of electric e-scooter sharing, among other factors.

We believe electrified, shared autonomous vehicles (AVs)—also called robo-taxis or shuttles—could address these pain points while revolutionizing urban mobility, making it more affordable, efficient, user friendly, environment friendly, and available to everyone.

That’s the dream, but the future is uncertain. No one knows today when the technology will be mature enough, when mass-market adoption might start, where it will start, whether customers will adopt it, or how fast and large this adoption will be.

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