The Era of the Private Automobile Is About to Be Over

Once you think about it, it seems almost inevitable. No, the age of the automobile is not about to end, but the age of the private ownership of automobiles is passing away … at this very moment. You might ask how this will impact the auto industry, for instance. We do not have the answer, but we should, as Kara Swisher writes, pay close attention to secular trends.

I will die before I buy another car.

I don’t say that because I am particularly old or sick, but because I am at the front end of one of the next major secular trends in tech. Owning a car will soon be like owning a horse — a quaint hobby, an interesting rarity and a cool thing to take out for a spin on the weekend.

Before you object, let me be clear: I will drive in cars until I die. But the concept of actually purchasing, maintaining, insuring and garaging an automobile in the next few decades?

Finished.

Of course, it all depends on where you live. If you live in large city and have a car you should probably be examined. If you live in a rural area, an area where you cannot just dial up an Uber, you might need to keep that truck.

Here is how it happens:

You start using car-sharing services, you don’t use your car as often, you realize as these services proliferate that you actually don’t need to own a car at all.

It’s obviously an easier decision if you live near a major metropolitan area, like I do, where the alternatives — cars and then car pools and then bikes and now scooters — are myriad. (Why, by the way, this is a revolution led by private companies instead of public transportation is an important topic for another day.) In other countries, often with denser populations, there are even more ideas bubbling up, from auto-rickshaws and motorbike taxis to new bus services.

But, in any area where car sharing companies function, why do you need a car? And this is before we arrive at autonomous, robot-driven vehicles.

Note that the advances in ride sharing have been produced by private enterprise, not by public entities. I trust that you do not find that surprising. In New York, government cannot make the subways function. You did not expect them to innovate, did you?

Swisher continues:

Car-sharing continues to increase (Uber and Lyft are set to go public this year), new innovations emerge all the time (Scooters! Vertical-take-off-and-landing vehicles!) and all manner of autonomous technologies are inevitable (Elon Musk, whatever you think of him or the prospects of Tesla, is 100 percent directionally correct). Private car ownership declined globally last year, and it is a trend that I believe is going to accelerate faster than people think.

We all think that maybe it will happen and that maybe it will happen eventually. But, Swisher suggests, it will probably happen much quicker than we imagine:

Consider how swiftly people moved from physical maps to map apps, from snail mail to email, from prime time TV to watching on demand. What had been long-held practices were quickly replaced by digital tools that made things easier, more convenient and simply better. Some of the shifts have been slower to develop, but then accelerated quickly, like what is now occurring in retail with online shopping and quick delivery pioneered by Amazon.

Simply put, everything that can be digitized will be digitized.

It’s probably a big deal. It’s probably going to come to us, sooner than we expect. The era of the private automobile is about to be over.