There are two foundational technology changes rolling through the car industry at the moment; electric and autonomy. Electric is happening right now, largely as a consequence of falling battery prices, while autonomy, or at least full autonomy, is a bit further off - perhaps 5-10 years, depending on how fast some pretty hard computer science problems get solved. Both of these will cycle into essentially the entire global stock of (today) around 1.1bn cars over a period of decades, subject to all sorts of variables, and both of them completely remake the car industry and its suppliers, as well as parts of the tech industry.

Both electric and autonomy have profound consequences beyond the car industry itself. Half of global oil production today goes to gasoline, and removing that demand will have geopolitical as well as industrial consequences. Over a million people are killed in car accidents every year around the world, mostly due to human error, and in a fully autonomous world all of those (and many more injuries) will also go away.

However, it's also useful, and perhaps more challenging, to think about second and third order consequences. Moving to electric means much more than replacing the gas tank with a battery, and moving to autonomy means much more than ending accidents. Quite what those consequences would be is much harder to predict: as the saying goes, it was easy to predict mass car ownership but hard to predict Wal-mart, and the broader consequences of the move to electric and autonomy will come in some very widely-spread industries, in complex interlocked ways. Still, we can at least point to where some of the changes might come. I can't tell you what will happen to car repairs, commercial real-estate or buses - I'm not an expert on any of those, and neither can anyone who is - but I can suggest that something will happen, and probably something big. Hence, this post is not a description of what will happen, but of where it might, and why, with some links to further reading.

Electric

Moving to electric reduces the number of moving parts in a car by something like an order of magnitude. It's less about replacing the fuel tank with a battery than ripping out the spine. That remakes the car industry and its supplier base (as well as related industries such as machine tools), but it also changes the repair environment, and the life of a vehicle. Roughly half of US spending on car maintenance goes on things that are directly attributable to the internal combustion engine, and much of that spending will just go away. In the longer term, this change might affect the lifespan of a vehicle: in an on-demand world vehicles would have higher loading, but absent that, fewer mechanical breakages (and fewer or no accidents) might mean a longer replacement cycle, once the rate of technology implementation settles down.

BLS car maintenance statistics, Automotive service employment.

Next, gas itself is bought in gas stations, of which there are about 150k in the USA. Those will also go away (unless there are radical changes in how long it takes to charge an EV). Since gas is sold at very low margins, these retailers make their actual money as convenience stores, so what happens to the products that are sold there? Some of this demand will be displaced to other retailers, and some may be going online anyway (especially if an Amazon drone can get you a bag of Cheesy Puffs in 15 minutes). But snacks, sodas and tobacco sell meaningful proportions of their total volume as impulse purchases attached to gasoline. Some of that volume might just go away.

Tobacco in particular might be interesting - well over half of US tobacco sales happens at gas stations, and there are meaningful indications that removing distribution reduces consumption - that cigarettes are often an impulse purchase and if they're not in front of you then many smokers are less likely to buy them. Car crashes kill 35k people a year in the USA, but tobacco kills 500k.

CDC on smoking deaths, Availability changes demand, gas station tobacco sales.

Gasoline is taxed, much less in the USA than in many other developed markets: it is 4% of UK tax revenue, for example. That tax revenue will have to be replaced, with other taxes on things that may be more elastic, and there will be economic and political consequences to that. In the USA, for example, highways are funded partly from gas taxes that have not risen to match inflation since 1993 - if just keeping it flat in real terms was politically impossible, how hard will it be to take that revenue from some other part of the economy?

Conversely, in many places (especially emerging markets) fuel is subsidised by the state - coal, gasoline and kerosene (for light and heat - see for example kerosene subsidies in India). EVs on one hand and solar on the other may change this as well.

IMF on energy subsides, UK tax revenue, US gas taxes, World Bank on global gas taxes.

Meanwhile, of course, we will still actually need to charge our EVs. Most estimates suggest that charging a fully electric fleet would lead to 10-20% more electricity demand. However, a lot depends on when they're charged: if they're charged off-peak this might not need more total generating capacity, though it would still change output and perhaps local distribution. The carbon impact of shifting electricity generation in this way is pretty complex (for example, over 75% of French electricity generation today comes from nuclear power), but in principle at least some grid generation almost always now comes from renewables.

More speculatively (and this is part of Elon Musk's vision), it is possible that we might all have large batteries in the home, storing off-peak power both to charge our cars and power our homes. Part of the aim here would be to push up battery volume and so lower their cost for both home storage and cars. If we all have such batteries then this could affect the current model of building power generation capacity for peak demand, since you could complement power stations with meaningful amounts of stored power for the first time.

Summary of EV power generation research, UK government study on options for charging infrastructure.

Autonomy

The really obvious consequence of autonomy is a near-elimination in accidents, which kill over 1m people globally every year. In the USA in 2015, there were 13m collisions of which 1.7m caused injuries; 2.4m people were injured and 35k people were killed. Something over 90% of all accidents are now caused by driver error, and a third of fatal accidents in the USA involved alcohol. Looking beyond deaths and injuries themselves, there is also a huge economic effect to these accidents: the US government estimates a cost of $240bn a year across property damage itself, medical and emergency services, legal, lost work and congestion (for comparison, US car sales in 2016 were around $600bn). A similar UK analysis found a cost of £30bn, which is roughly equivalent adjusted for the population. This then comes from government (and so taxes), insurance and individual pockets. It also means jobs, of course.

Even simple 'Level 3' systems would cut many kinds of accident, and as more vehicles with more sophisticated systems, moving up to Level 5, cycle into the installed base over time, the collision rate will drop continuously. There should be an analogue of the 'herd immunity' effect - even if your car is still hand-driven, my automatic car is still much less likely to collide with you. This also means that cycling would become much safer (though you'd still need to live close enough to where you wanted to go), and that in turn has implications for public health. You might never get to zero accidents - the deer running in front of a car might still get hit sometimes - but you might get pretty close.

US crash statistics, Effects of auto-braking, US economic impact of crashes, UK accident costs, analysis of pedestrian deaths, effect of L3 on crashes, cycling potential in London

That, in turn, has consequences for vehicle design - if you have no collisions then eventually you can remove many of the safety features in today's vehicles, all of which add cost and weight and constrain the overall design - no more airbags or crumple zones, perhaps. A decade ago the NHTSA estimated that the safety measures that it mandates collectively added $839 (in 2002 dollars so $1,136 now) and 125 pounds of weight, which was 4% of both average cost and average weight - this is probably a lower bound. That, of course, presumes that there are no other changes to the design as a result of removing the human controls - which is like removing the reins from a horseless carriage and thinking nothing else will change.

NHTSA on the costs of safety measures.

What else, though?

As more and more cars are driven by computer, they can drive in different ways. They don't suffer from traffic waves, they don't need to stop for traffic signals and they can platoon - they can safely drive 2 feet apart at 80 mph. There is a whole range of human behaviors that reduce road capacity, especially on freeways: it's not just that people make mistakes, but that computers can drive in totally different ways to even a perfect human driver. The video below illustrates one of these issues, familiar to anyone who's been stuck in a traffic jam on a highway and got to the front to find no apparent cause - human behaviour causes traffic waves, which cause 'phantom jams'. Computers wouldn't do this, and if they did, we could stop them.