What will disrupt our beloved taxis?

The automotive industry has come a long way in the past 140 years. The first car was built in 1886, the first commercially successful car was launched in 1908 (Ford Model T). The first hybrid electric was launched in 1997 as the Toyota Prius. Today, electric cars are synonymous with Tesla! Almost every car manufacturer, taxi aggregators such as Uber, technology companies such as Google and several stand-alone startups such as Zoox are in a race to win the autonomous vehicle segment.?

However, all of this growth has been incremental. Our cars have been materially the same for the last 100 years. Better and efficient engines, fuel, entertainment system and safety features. The major change driver for cars and consequently taxis have been the microchips, which have actually made vehicles “smart and connected”.

All indicators point to driverless taxis being the next battlefront. Read this excerpt from Vox, published on 28th Feb 2020

In 2020, you’ll be a permanent backseat driver,” the Guardian predicted in 2015. “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020,” blared a Business Insider headline from 2016. Those declarations were accompanied by announcements from General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Toyota, and Honda that they’d be making self-driving cars by 2020. Elon Musk forecast that Tesla would do it by 2018 — and then, when that failed, by 2020.

Electric vehicles form just 2.6% of total vehicle sales in the world in 2020 and almost 40% of those sales happen in China. ?

Fully electric taxis and self-driving taxis as a major proportion of last-mile urban mobility looks to be a distant future! Do we have an upcoming competitor to the taxi industry? Or will the traditional taxi industry survive in new forms of sharing economy??

Potentially, advancement in ride-sharing will take over the private car industry. People would be able to time share on vehicles, without the cost of ownership. Read this excerpt from ZDnet -

Cars are inefficient: They are parked 95% of the time. Cars generate a lot of air pollution: An average passenger car emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. Cars are expensive: An owner spends about $9,576 per year on gas, maintenance, insurance, and loans.?

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) could change all of these dynamics, if they are shared and electric.”

However, can taxis be disrupted by electric bicycles, scooters and unicycles? Since a significant percentage of cab rides are single-person rides, it is more efficient to just use an electric scooter or a unicycle. There are important challenges to this technology such as range, high temperatures and uninvited rains. Nevertheless, I believe urban mobility will be disrupted by new types of electric vehicles instead of electric taxis or self-driving vehicles.

So what does the future of last-mile connectivity in urban mobility looks like? Potentially users getting out from the Metro or similar long-distance public transport systems and hopping on to an electric scooter to take them to the file destination.? We might soon have electric scooter lanes alongside car and bus lanes! Self-driving cars may not be here soon enough.