erless cars to house their childrens’ car seats and favorite toys and sippy cups. Another loyal car-buying segment will be die-hard gadget-hounds who will eagerly buy a sexy upgraded model every year or so, unable to resist the siren song of AI that is three times as safe, or a ride that is twice as smooth. Finally, consider the allure of robot- ic diversity. Commuters will invest in a home offi ce on wheels, a sleek, traveling workspace resembling the fi rst-class suite on an airplane. On the high end of the market, city-dwellers and country-dwell- ers alike will special-order custom-made autonomous vehicles whose shape and on-board gadgetry is adapted for a partic- ular function or hobby. Privately-owned small businesses will buy their own auton- omous delivery robot that could range in size from a knee-high, last-mile delivery pod, to a giant, long-haul shipping device. As autonomous vehicles near commer- cial viability, Waymo’s procurement deal

with Fiat Chrysler is just the beginning. The exact value of this future automo- tive industry has yet to be defi ned, but research from Intel’s internal autono- mous vehicle division estimates this new so-called “passenger economy” could be worth nearly $7 trillion a year. To po- sition themselves to capture a chunk of this potential revenue, companies whose businesses used to lie in previously dis- parate fi elds such as robotics, software, ships, and entertainment (to name but a few) have begun to form a bewildering web of what they hope will be symbiotic partnerships. Car hailing and chip com- panies are collaborating with car rental companies, who in turn are befriending giant software fi rms, who are launching joint projects with all sizes of hardware companies, and so on. Last year, car companies sold an esti- mated 80 million new cars worldwide. Over the course of nearly a century, car companies and their partners, global

chains of suppliers and service providers, have become masters at mass-producing and maintaining sturdy and cost-effective human-driven vehicles. As autonomous vehicle technology becomes ready for mainstream use, traditional automotive companies are being forced to grapple with the painful realization that they must compete in a new playing fi eld. The challenge for traditional car-mak- ers won’t be that people no longer want to own cars. Instead, the challenge will be learning to compete in a new and larger transportation industry where consum- ers will choose their product according to the appeal of its customized body and the quality of its intelligent software.

Melba Kurman and Hod Lipson are the authors of Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead and

Fabricated: the New World of 3D Printing. This article is reprinted with permission from www.singularityhub.com.

AUTOMOTIVE RECYCLING • March-April 2018

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