An overlapping confluence of three different technological waves — the smartphone, the electric vehicle and artificial intelligence — have created the conditions for a technological disruption so profound it’s going to change almost everything about the way we move in modern society.

Where is this all going?
Within a few years, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper, more durable and more reliable than petrol powered cars, autonomy will be good enough that you don’t need human drivers and everyone will be able to hail a car on their phone (or their voice-activated Alexa spectacles). The cost of taking a car trip will be cheaper than getting a coffee, which means it will be accessible to everyone. Overnight, we’ll see a mass defection to mobility as a service.

This is the real kicker: we don’t have to wait for people to get rid of their old cars; they simply walk out their front door one morning and decide they would prefer to hail an autonomous, electric vehicle. Given a choice, people will select the cheaper option. And that option will not include ownership. The combustion vehicle won’t disappear gradually — it’ll happen in the space of a year or two. We are talking about the kind of disruption in urban mobility that we haven’t seen in 100 years happening in a matter of months.

Recent studies from Bloomberg, the London School of Economics and Stanford University have all pegged the date of the confluence of these three technological waves at around 2020 or 2021.

[link to medium.com (secure)]