Perspectives on the future of the car The market sale of autonomous vehicles is in the foreseeable future and is expected to be commonplace by 2030. Industry experts believe that autonomous vehicles have the potential to solve a range of problems including environmental, safety and even time constraints. This is expected to change our attitudes and behaviours toward mobility. Will the impact of autonomous vehicles be as powerful as predicted? Do autonomous vehicles have the potential to reverse the trend in global warming as a consequence of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? • If car parks and garages become obsolete, the land space could be used for more efficient metropolitan development. • The environmental impact of autonomous vehicles has the potential to slow, halt or even reverse the trend in global warming.• Self-driving cars will alter our attitudes and behaviours toward mobility. • Experts in the field of mobility and innovation predict that autonomous vehicles will start to become commonplace in the market by 2025 or 2030. “We will look at cars the way we look at horses today: very few people will own them. Experts will race them; we will watch them for entertainment” – Glen Hiemstra, creator of futurist.com “Both Google and Tesla predict that the 100% fully autonomous cars (where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep, and wake up at your destination) will be available to the public by 2020” According to innovation and mobility experts like Johan Peter Paludan (Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies) and Erik Van den Heuvel (Daimler Group), autonomous cars will be probably for sale in the year 2020 and will start to become commonplace by 2025 or 2030. Automated cars could solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point. The beginning is in fact already there. Tesla Motor’s declares that their 2020 models will be able to self-drive 90% of the time. From Morgan Stanley’s research we know that cars are driven just 4% of the year, which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of individual car ownership. Maarten Kooniman, founder of car sharing scheme Tapazz argues that next to a house, an automobile is the second-most expensive asset that most people will ever buy — it is no surprise that ride sharing services like Uber and car sharing services like Zipcar, Car2go and Tapazz are quickly gaining popularity as an alternative to car ownership. But what is even more amazing is that the self-driving car will alter our attitudes and behaviours towards mobility in a never seen way: Broad societal and environmental potential: Morgan Stanley estimates that a 90% reduction in crashes would save one million lives a year worldwide. Driverless cars do not need to park — vehicles cruising the street looking for parking spots account for an astounding 30% of city traffic, not to mention that eliminating curb-side parking would add two extra lanes of capacity to many city streets. Traffic jams will become non-existent, saving the average commuter 38 hours every year – nearly a full working week. As parking lots and garages, car dealerships, and bus stations become obsolete, tens of millions of square feet of available prime real estate will spur explosive metropolitan development. The environmental impact of autonomous cars has the potential to reverse the trend of global warming and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. As most autonomous cars are likely to be electric, estimates are that 134 billion gallons of gasoline will be saved a year in the US alone.