Consumer adoption of peer-to-peer and ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft points toward a generational sea change in how consumers and businesses view transportation. These changing behaviors are combining with rising urbanization, pervasive high-speed mobile broadband, and rapid technological leaps in computing power and data center capacity to enable these new business models to drive and accelerate the development and use of autonomous mobility solutions.
Ironically, carmakers have turned to offering these same car-sharing and ad hoc use applications to drive up utilization rates. The global nature and scale of this change has major implications for the adoption and use of autonomous “Mobility-as-a-Service” among consumers and businesses alike. “Being driven” by intelligent, pilotless vehicles will represent the essential nature of future transportation.
Strategy Analytics expects that, as we move toward SAE level five1 vehicle autonomy, these megatrends will combine and enable Mobility-as-a-Service to open the door to an emerging new market that we refer to as the “Passenger Economy.” This Passenger Economy represents the value of the products and services derived from the use of fully autonomous, pilotless vehicles, including the indirect savings in both time and resources generated by the use of pilotless vehicles.