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Leith Cars Blog

Here’s What the Future of Autonomous Ride Sharing Will Look Like

autonomous ride sharing

Our society is approaching a major milestone in automotive technology. In the next 15 years, transportation is going to change more than it has in the last century. The most notable of those changes being, who’s behind the wheel. Here’s a hint: it probably won’t be you.

The changing tides

What we mean is, we’re approaching a time when cars are going to do our driving for us. Big names like Ford, Fiat, and Volkswagen are pumping billions of dollars into autonomous vehicles and ride sharing services, which means they’re expecting to make a lot more back. And if all goes as planned, that’s exactly what they’ll do. To explain what the future holds for autonomous vehicles, ride sharing services, and car manufacturers, let’s review what we already know.

Laying the foundation

We know car manufactures are going to build autonomous cars; we know those same manufacturers are investing in ride-sharing companies; and we know companies are already supplying ride sharing services with fleets of autonomous vehicles to test. Now let’s hypothesize.

Hip-hop-hypothesize

Hypothesis 1: Ford, Google, GM, Apple, etc., are investing in ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft to secure their stake in the autonomous ride-sharing cash-cow.

Uber has already deployed their first self-driving Ford Fusion onto the streets of Pittsburgh, and their CEO Travis Kalanick has said many times that he envisions Uber as an autonomous ride-sharing service. Once that happens, car manufacturers want to make sure they’re getting a piece of that pie.

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The point is to provide reliable transportation for as many people as possible. When you take the driver out of the equation, the ride becomes cheaper, and therefore more accessible to everyone. Which leads us to our next Hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2: In the future, you will be able to pay an affordable monthly fee for 24/7 access to autonomous ride services.

Think of it like a Netflix subscription for your car. Here’s what Kalanick had to say about the driverless future:

“The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car, you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” Kalanick said. “So the magic there is you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”

In a world where you can get just about anything on a monthly payment service, this seems to be a likely evolution. Personal vehicles will never completely phase out, but we might see a decline in the future due to companies like Uber. Who knows, we may be selling exclusively autonomous cars by 2050.

What do you think it’ll be like?

Leave us a comment here or on Facebook and tell us what you think those autonomous cars will look like! We’re imagining everything from luxury autonomous vehicles with flat screen TVs and seltzer water, to bare-bones no-frills vehicles that smell a little. Either way, the future is exciting.