Almost 8 years ago, on a morning drive to work, I remember listening to a talk about a potential driverless world. What would the cars of the future look and feel like? How would the design evolve to cater to a fully hands off passenger base. What strategic partnerships made the strongest case?
Reimagining a hypothetical often revolves around scenario mapping, paired with understanding user motivations and careful calibration of the product to balance somewhere in the middle of it all.
Almost a decade later, that world seems to finally be here. Tesla, recently gave a sneak peak into the driverless robo-taxis and personal robots (Optimus), and I, like many was thoroughly impressed. Innovation often emerges in patches first, before converging to a unified market bending product that changes the course of the collective user-base.
With Robotics, I believe we are getting closer to having prototypes that will drive real world implications for the common populace. Boston Dynamics comes to mind as one of the most impressive leaders in this space over the last few years. Tesla’s announcement, with its magnetism, market position and prowess will also accelerate the fringe development wings in leading universities and innovation circles towards the needful development. Robotics as a market sector is primed to grow faster than ever and will remain the next frontier for strong investment and development in the coming years.
The human machine interface in robotics seems ever closer to enablement with the middle layer of LLMs and vision technology as the necessary building blocks.
The future looks promising and markedly different in many ways. Autonomous cars, Personal Robots, Medical Devices, Construction – every sector will bear the benefit of primary use cases being solved with Robotics. In my opinion, gigantic market segments stand to be created and will have a marked impact on the stakeholders involved.
Take the case of autonomous driving. Autonomous driving, a subset of robotics will reshape a number of players in the ecosystem in different ways.
The users will be beneficiaries of increasingly safer driving. New vehicle designs will evolve more towards comfort and leisure than complete utilitarianism. Average Long distance travel per capita should increase or longer trips will become relatively easier, leading to more frequent subsequent commerce.Additional time will unlocked during commute hours per commuter. Shared mobility should trend upwards and drive average price of a trip to a fraction of where it stands today with individual rides. Coordination amongst on road vehicles will come into play, further benefiting from increased efficiency via better route planning and more ROI from the underlying resources, vehicles and infrastructure alike.
Supply demand dynamics alongside active traffic on route will define not only pricing but also most efficient ways of commute.
Comprehensive retrofitting solutions that are modular and can be installed on existing vehicles should be expected to emerge.
Cities will have to evolve to cater to the changing landscape. Driverless cars have the potential to turn city planning on its head with major CAPEX and developmental decisions directly impacted by changes in traffic flow. A large fleet of robotic vehicles demands a strong battery replacement / battery charging network. Utilities will have a unique challenge to divert usage / demand to relatively less dense areas. Cities that employ large driver employee bases, will see major shifts over the 5-10 year periods, and cost elements shifting from variable to more CAPEX based fixed investments. Some will also be able to provide services around the clock and cater to routes that were previously not possible
Insurance companies will have to rethink their pricing models. Not only will the average age of the car reduce with higher average occupancy, the number of accidents should trend downwards. On a per capita basis, we should expect far lesser accidents per lifecycle of a car. Shared mobility will take the center stage of insurance planning.
Car manufacturers and OEMs is another segment that will be directly impacted. Fleet owners customer segments will have a much higher CAGR as compared to individual owner segments, which should be expected to shrink. Moreover, some variants of owner operator models might emerge to introduce a new player in the operational domains. Would some OEMs consider downward OEM, Owner operator model? Remains to be seen. If theres a strong business case around it, it might be enticing.
Theoretically, the introduction of robo-taxis gives the car ownership model a shake. The individual car owners loss will be the fleet customer’s gain. A large segment of users. who own a car out of necessity may not find it feasible anymore to incur the capital expenditure. Not only will shared robo-taxis be the norm that they walk into, the idea of car ownership will truly revolve around the enthusiasts. With the abundance of robo taxis, the average price per ride should trend downwards drastically. A new class of owner operators will emerge, resulting in the expansion of a fleet owner economy. This means solutions around periodic servicing of fleet customers can no longer be ignored and product lines touching this customer segment will emerge and grow.
Real estate, especially in city centers will see some redevelopment with lesser need for parking. On a per capita basis, parking consumption should trend downwards. A large amount of parking spaces will open up for repurposing – whether it be housing, green spaces or commercial builds, remains to be seen.
Electric grids will need to become more resilient. With EV growth relatively stabilized over the past couple of years, Robo-taxis stand to be the needed/next big boost that will further accelerate the divide and adoption of EVs over ICE. We should see size-able grid investments in grid enhancement projects, especially near dense population centers. While utilities will benefit from the peak shaving support from the battery segments, they will need to invest to maintain reliability / security requirements to support the new mobility. Utilities are already fortifying the existing infrastructure as evident in spending patterns. Going forward these trends should sustain for quite some time.
Meaningful technological change often occurs in patches – gradual then sudden. It often takes years to have the fundamental building blocks, compute, frameworks in place first, before visible, end-user centric products come to the fore. With the advancement in GPTs and compute infrastructure over the last few years, Robotics seems to be the next frontier that will usher in significant growth in years to come. The building blocks are in place and the key focus will remain on utilizing the GPTs to create the interface for repeatable predictable actions with careful calibration and use case definition. Linear first, composite later. Some exciting changes in the world of autonomous are around the corner and its an exciting time to be here for it.