In most industrialized countries the inflation-adjusted average price of a new car has dropped from the mid 20th century to the present day.
With respect to average household earnings, for example, the real price of a new car in the U.S. fell by 10 percent from 1998 to 2006.
Except for the last decade when unanticipated international events and new electronic systems sometimes raised the real price from one year to the next, the trend has been almost continuously downward.
Joseph Giacomin is a professor of human centered design at Brunel University in London and the author of multiple publications on the subject.
Car and truck production has benefited from nearly continuous improvements in manufacturing automation and supply chain logistics over a long period of time. And this has allowed the real price of the machines to remain stable or drop.
But now various forms of autonomous vehicles are beginning to appear on the horizon. And one characteristic that is often neglected in current debates is their likely price.
Logic suggests that fully autonomous vehicles will have to provide most or all of the capabilities of current human-driven vehicles, but also many more. And changes in capability inevitably bring with them changes in price.
So many additional sensors and so much additional computer processing will invariably come at a price, literally. Given the development, production and maintenance costs of such complex machines the future fully autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be expensive.
In fact, much, possibly most, of the real-world value associated with a traditional car or truck is not derived from the capabilities of the vehicle but instead from those of the driver.
What is the value of a cab without a cabbie? What is the value of a police car without a police officer? And what is the value of a hatchback to a family whose members do not possess drivers’ licenses? Not all that much. And the rather reasonable cost of many current cars and trucks is the confirmation.
In part, the price of 20th and early 21st century human-driven vehicles was contained by continuously shifting the increasingly complex driving decisions and other activities on to the human driver.
Instead, fully autonomous vehicles will have to do all of these things by themselves. Autonomous, independent and responsible. Such disruptively different forms of road transport will carry a premium price tag, will require a highly efficient business model and will require careful customer-centric design to get the sums to add up.
And given their expected expense it is likely that the future fully autonomous cars will usually act as a service, rather than be a possession.
Few people other than the super-rich will wish to leave such costly machines sitting around parked all day. Thus, in most cases the value will be provided by something that the fully autonomous vehicle does rather than something which it is.
And in many cases the mobility may even prove to be an additional benefit rather than a core concern.
The capable computerized companions will be able to do many things for people beyond dropping them off somewhere. And to amortize their non-trivial price tag they will probably have to deploy many of their capabilities in productive ways when in movement.
Even when manifested in the form of robotaxis for short trips from point A to point B, the capable computerized companions will be providing information and services along the way.
Passengers will leverage their information-handling capabilities and their automation for many matters. Thus, service providers of the world beware, the autonomous vehicles are coming.
