A Car that is ….. Self-Driving, Smart-Parking ……. and Owned by No-One

As autonomous vehicles, smart-cars and car-sharing gain traction, automakers are aware that the market is changing and embracing the idea that future mobility is going to be more about moving people than selling cars.

At the moment there are about seven billion people in the world, and there are about one billion vehicles in use today. At a conservative estimate - that’ll grow to around nine billion people and four billion cars by the middle of the century. A lot more people are concentrated in urban areas and megacities, so when you combine those things, you start to think about the issues associated with so many vehicles operating in dense areas – possibly resulting in planet-wide traffic jams!

Highway gridlock, a fruitless search for a parking space or a brush with a thundering tractor-trailer can rattle all drivers.

Things are about to get better.

A new wave of innovation, led by carmakers and automotive-tech companies, is transforming the driving experience. Thanks largely to on-board computers, our vehicles are becoming smarter, nimbler, safer and more fun. Fully self-driving cars remain some years away. But new technology in the next five to 10 years will help cars park themselves, monitor the alertness of the driver and even communicate with each other to avoid collisions.

The cars of the future will be vehicles you subscribe to, rather than own.

Helsinki has announced plans to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point "mobility on demand" system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car. The Finnish capital aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

There is a clear trend toward shared mobility: more cars and bikes are being shared in cities, both via peer-to-peer and business-to-consumer models. As car-sharing services such as Zipcar, Uber, Lyft and Halo gain global popularity, automakers such as Ford and General Motors are already supplying vehicles to these service providers.

Car sharing is one mobility mode set to become much more ubiquitous in the next few years. The strongest growth is expected to be seen in regions with mature urban mobility systems, such as Western Europe, North America and some Asian Pacific cities, because they are easier to target due to their existing infrastructure and an openness on the part of economically and environmentally conscious consumers to embrace options that are cheaper and more sustainable. Beyond car sharing, we’ve got integrated systems - where companies would offer a service that’s still a journey from A to B, but to conduct that journey it would be a combination of a car and maybe a train or a bus !