In 2018 I predicted that we would start seeing autonomous vehicles on the road in the next 5 years and I am still a believer that will be the case.
The political push back on having autonomous cars on the road will not be able to slow down the pace of the demand and investment. Most likely a lot of the push back has to do with companies that have not evolved their technology and are trying to slow this down. This is similar to how Tesla is and was not allowed to sell in certain states because they don’t have a physical dealership. Obviously, that didn’t stop the demand for their cars.
The autonomous vehicle model that I believe we will see is a monthly payment similar to a lease that we would make to Uber, Lyft, Google, etc. for the usage of a certain type of vehicle for certain amount of miles a year. The difference between a current lease and the future one is that you wouldn’t have one car, but rather access to a fleet similar to Uber today. An example would be that you pay $300 a month for a midsize car and you will always be picked up in an autonomous midsize car, but don’t have to pay for insurance, maintenance, gas/electricity.