Skip to main content

Report predicts how future mobility solutions will affect automotive OEMs

Global management consultancy, Arthur D. Little (ADL) has released a new study, The Future of Automotive Mobility, based on a global survey of 6,500 participants, including customers, industry players and regulators. The report examines how the megatrends of electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving are likely to impact on the global automotive ecosystem and future OEM sales. The report notes that the future of mobility will no longer depend primarily on the preferences of customers, but wil
March 31, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
Global management consultancy, Arthur D. Little (ADL) has released a new study, The Future of Automotive Mobility, based on a global survey of 6,500 participants, including customers, industry players and regulators. The report examines how the megatrends of electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving are likely to impact on the global automotive ecosystem and future OEM sales.

The report notes that the future of mobility will no longer depend primarily on the preferences of customers, but will increasingly be driven by regulation as cities seek to resolve traffic-generated problems such as congestion and poor air quality. Electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving solutions all have an important role to play in meeting these challenges. However, ADL believes the effect on traditional OEMs’ production volume may not be as severe as some experts have predicted.

As an example, the report says a key component of autonomous driving will be “mobility-on-demand” solutions, in which customers use “robot taxis.” Based on real mobility data from almost 100 mega-cities, ADL simulated the effect of robot taxis upon mobility behaviour and car sales. The findings revealed that even with total market coverage, their effect was not as bad as the predicted worst case scenario.

The report details how new roles are being created in the automotive-supplier pyramid, with the shift to the electric drive train and the increasing importance of software being additional factors to consider. However, a major challenge for manufacturers is the loss of direct access to the mobility customer.
 
Wolf-Dieter Hoppe, author of the study and associate director at ADL, warns: “Millions of individual customers will be replaced by a few very large, multinational fleet operators. These could take over the dominant role of OEMs in the ecosystem, as they would have direct customer access as well as considerable volume power. In particular, this would be a problem for today’s premium manufacturers.”

Related Content

  • Daimler’s double take sees machine vision move in-vehicle
    December 13, 2013
    Jason Barnes looks at Daimler’s Intelligent Drive programme to consider how machine vision has advanced the state of the art of vision-based in-vehicle systems. Traditionally, radar was the in-vehicle Driver Assistance System (DAS) technology of choice, particularly for applications such as adaptive cruise control and pre-crash warning generation. Although vision-based technology has made greater inroads more recently, it is not a case of ‘one sensor wins’. Radar and vision are complementary and redundancy
  • Using electricity to power road freight
    October 22, 2014
    Next year sees the start of the first real-life electrified road system for transporting freight. Worldwide freight transportation is predicted to double by 2050 but despite expansion of global rail infrastructure only one third of this additional freight transport can be handled by trains. This means that the largest proportion of freight transport will continue to be by road and as a result, experts expect global CO2 emissions from road freight traffic to more than double by 2050.
  • New technologies enable increased collaboration, cooperation
    July 17, 2012
    The continued expansion of IP camera networks increases the availability of useful information. At the same time, the opportunity exists to increase inter-agency collaboration. This makes information management all the more necessary in the control room environment. But the transportation sector could do a lot to help itself by gaining a better idea up front of what and how it wants to do things, says Electrosonic's Karl Johnson.
  • Vision technology: the future in focus
    November 23, 2018
    Just a few years ago, terms such as ‘embedded’ and ‘polarisation’ were buzzwords. But now they are real and present examples of vision technology in action – and, Adam Hill finds, the ITS industry is waking up to a number of possible applications Every aspect of the intelligent transportation systems industry moves quickly – but developments in camera technology change with a rapidity which can appear quite bewildering. And with ITS providers constantly searching for an edge against fierce competitio