French ride-sharing start-up BlaBlaCar is the latest technology firm to be bullish on driverless cars, predicting they'll be used like public transport. BlaBlaCar was recently valued at $1.5 billion after a recent funding round. It is a ride-sharing service for long-distance journeys. For example, someone could post that they driving from London to Manchester on specific date, and another user could hop in the car with them and share the cost. The service claims that one of its biggest selling points is its community, where passengers and drivers can rate each other. And BlaBlaCar's co-founder thinks driverless cars will be "fantastic" for the start-up as they will need to be filled up with as many passengers as possible.



"Once you have driverless cars, especially between cities, the only way to use them efficiently is to put more than one person in the car, and they will almost be used like public transport. So the question is how do you match four people in that car?," Nicolas Brusson, co-founder and chief operating officer of BlaBlaCar, told CNBC in an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Tuesday. "We will be one of the key services because we will be like, how do you share driverless cars? So from that point of view, you will need a community of people sharing rides. Who has that today? We do. Google doesn't have that, car manufacturers even less. So that's where I think the long term value is for us." Driverless cars has been one of the hottest topics for technology companies from Google to Uber. Google is testing its own autonomous vehicles while Uber is developing some self-driving cars itself.



Emerging market expansion

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