Who will own these self-driving, electric cars? If you own one personally, it could drive you to work and back. A great experience, but parking it during the night and day is inefficient. The car could drive around other people during the 95% of the time you don’t use it.
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The trouble is: What if you decide to go home unexpectedly and the car is on the other side of town? Either your car is never allowed to go far away (inefficient) or you will end up taking another self-driving car. So why would you own one yourself in the first place then?
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Once you don’t drive in your own car anymore, you need access to a generic one anytime anywhere. That is the service car sharing platforms, like Uber, provide. They figure out how many people need a car when and where, and ensure there are enough cars to match it affordably.pic.twitter.com/RvfQVATj9A
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That still doesn’t answer the question who owns the car. One option is that private people invest in a self-driving car and make it available on these sharing platforms. Who maintains and cleans those cars though?
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Another option is that manufacturers or sharing platforms will own the cars, but it gets expensive fast. There are 260 million registered cars in the United States. If self-driving and sharing increases utilization from 5% to 75%, you need 18 million cars for the same usage.
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At $50k per car (double the current average purchase price), the manual to autonomous transition would cost $900 billion. For America alone. That’s twice the cost of building the United States interstate highway system.pic.twitter.com/jnUZ3dk2Kh
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How to raise $900 billion to finance 18 million self-driving cars is almost a bigger challenge than manufacturing them. Luckily, there are already organizations which specialize in this: Leasing companies.
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Leasing companies are specialized in raising capital and using that to generate a steady revenue stream. There is little difference for them between consumers or sharing platforms paying for a car.
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With car sharing, riders care more about price and availability than which car they get. And once these personal preferences no longer matter, leasing companies will optimize for total cost of ownership. Expect cars which are easier to maintain, clean, and repair.
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Replying to @thijsniks
Interest next level question to consider is how value capture will be distributed between, OEMs, leasing / fleet intermediaries and rideshare / consumer facing mobility services. Everyone has role to play but who gets the high value part of chain?
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That’s a key question. All of them hope to be the point of integration and thus capture the value. Hard to tell so far which layer that will be though.
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