Autonomous Cars: Breaking Down Market Forecasts
This will take advances in M2M standards*, and a layered approach that involves improvements in GPS, Roads, Signals, and a layered array of sensors - in the cars and in the roads. I don’t have any doubts that it will come to be however. It will start mostly with autonomous freight and short haul transport vehicles.
*Don’t know what M2M means? It’s “Machine to Machine” communications - if cars will drive themselves then they will need to talk to other machines, like your garage door opener. If your phone needs to know your user context it might need to query other nearby machines for everything from GPS to temperature to any other environmental factor available to sensors. So standards need to be there for M2M - security, privacy, stability, etc. etc.
How many “autonomous cars” do you think you’ll see on the road worldwide in, say, 2030?
Now, before getting caught up in the razzle-dazzle of Google self-driving cars, let’s do the numbers we’re fairly sure of.
It turns out that opinions and forecasts among industry experts wildly vary — ranging from an estimate of 20-30 million to 95 million autonomous cars around 2030 to 2035. This, however, depends on how autonomous people mean when they say “autonomous cars” and what sort of legal and commercial roadblocks they anticipate before the market reaches the nirvana of the self-driving car.
On one end of the spectrum, Navigant Research of Boulder, Colo., offers perhaps the most optimistic prediction for self-driving cars. In a report called “Autonomous Vehicles,” just released on Wednesday, Aug. 21, the market research firm pegged sales of autonomous vehicles to grow from fewer than 8,000 annually in 2020 to 95.4 million in 2035.
Translated in a percentage of worldwide car sales, autonomous cars are expected to go up sharply from 0.01 per cent in 2020 to 75 per cent in 2035, David Alexander, senior research analyst with Navigant Research, told EE Times.
In the predictions given above, Navigant Research defines “autonomous” as synonymous with the Google driverless car — a vehicle that could essentially function as one’s chauffeur.