DieselFumes
2015 4x4 2500 170 Crew
Posting this in "The Competition" because it's competition to all privately owned vehicles.
Bob Lutz (who was head of product development at GM, also at Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Opel) just wrote an opinion piece about the future of transportation for Automotive News.
Bob Lutz (who was head of product development at GM, also at Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Opel) just wrote an opinion piece about the future of transportation for Automotive News.
Nothing particularly new there, except that he goes into the implications for the industry, for individuals, and for communities.Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.
The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
On the freeway, it will merge seamlessly into a stream of other modules traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn't matter. You have a blending of rail-type with individual transportation.
And this change won't be driven by personal preference, but rather by big players.The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.
And it's the end of manufacturer differentiation.we don't need public acceptance of autonomous vehicles at first. All we need is acceptance by the big fleets: Uber, Lyft, FedEx, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, utility companies, delivery services. Amazon will probably buy a slew of them. These fleet owners will account for several million vehicles a year. Every few months they will order 100,000 low-end modules, 100,000 medium and 100,000 high-end. The low-cost provider that delivers the specification will get the business.
It's a short and interesting read.But the performance will be the same for all because nobody will be passing anybody else on the highway. That is the death knell for companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. That kind of performance is not going to count anymore.