“
all those big car companies have a professionalism and ability to get stuff done. That’s worth something
Smith says
at least when drivers are involved, traffic is the “feedback”
which encourages people to use the most efficient way of getting from A to B. “But with AVs, you can see
a situation where cities are congested and the roads are full of cars doing these little personalised deliveries. If you’re sitting in your house, whether it takes an hour, two hours, or three to turn up, you won’t care. “So, there will need to be
regulation around how do you prevent the roads being stuffed with an endless number of vehicles.”
CHALLENGING ROADS
AHEAD One of the questions the families and executives running the family-controlled car giants will undoubtedly be ‘What do we imagine ourselves becoming?’. Nieuwenhuis says they will be looking hard at whether they
and making cars more compatible with sustainability. [AVs] seem to have come about from the mentality that engineers can do it, therefore it must be done.” Smith says AVs carry the risk of
unintended consequences, particularly in terms of damage to the environment. “One of the things people already
Top right: Uber faces growing competition from other ridesharing firms, such as Lyft, BlablaCar and Turo. Ride-linking, where a passenger shares a single journey with several people at once, is predicted to grow
do is order stupidly small items to [be delivered], which is absolutely terrible form a carbon efficiency point-of-view. But no-one is capturing the externalities of what that means. “The fact is people are fundamentally
very lazy and if things are easy and convenient, we do it. If you can order an autonomous car to deliver something to your house, we will do it.”
will be maintaining their manufacturing and operational skills, or focus more on the customer relationship side. Toyota has already said it has an exit strategy if cars do
not work out, and there are other examples like Peugeot’s family holding company PSA which makes comparatively small quantities of other products like bicycles and coffee machines. “They’ve said, there is a plan B, if cars don’t work we
have something to fall back on, and we still have a family business,” Nieuwenhuis says. Smith says while there were no doubt “very challenging”
times ahead for family groups, “these are companies which have withstood massive structural and technological change over scores of decades”. “It’s incredible the number of times Ford or VW, or BMW
have reinvented themselves and kept ahead. Not that they’ve always been consistently financially successful, but they’ve managed to stay alive.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: JAAP ARRIENS/NURPHOTO/SIPA USA, MAURO UJETTO/NURPHOTO
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