The auto industry will be interesting over the next 20 years with the development of self-driving cars. I read a story about a year ago where this guy made the case that in the future most people won't own cars. The average person drives their car about 5% of the hours in a day. So it sits 95% of the time. His premise is most people will use car services like Uber or Lyft vs. owning a car.
It will be interesting.
Cars will soon be part of the internet of things.
The no ownership future works better in other countries and big cities. But EV manufacturers have incentive to not sell away their actual commodity, energy storage batteries. And consumers have incentive to not buy cars/batteries with 400 miles of range when they only need it infrequently. When we lived in chicago full time we had a Hertz subscription that gave us access to an extra car anytime we needed one without any hassle (parking costs, insurance, etc). This is even easier if it comes to you with full self driving.
It’s kind of like any subscription service. Car manufacturers make more in the end, end users gain optionality. Tesla will likely sell self driving and batteries on a subscription imo. BMW tried to do this with seat heaters! EVs are modular, so you can swap packs and pay more in a monthly when you need 400 miles rather than 180.
The main commodity of Tesla are the batteries. This is particularly true if batteries become so long lasting you can cycle it for a million miles. Selling batteries that last decades for $5K (currently 8k) is super cheap. If Tesla were to maintain ownership, while also controlling the software that makes the car part of the IoT, Tesla becomes a large energy utility. It also solves their biggest bottleneck- battery production. Total Tesla battery GWs are more efficiently allocated.
You already don’t own the software on these cars. See John Deere. Hopefully that changes, but if it doesn’t and Tesla continues to be a POS with how everything voids warranty, then a company like Google or Apple coukd come to seek market share by providing 3rd party software and management of the car/batteries while providing a better warranty. Again, just another IoT. The amount of data coming off these things will also give auto insurance companies a run for their money. All of this again points to Tesla not selling the batteries/cars imo. Tough switch over to apple or Google when you don’t own the batteries or car.