Juniper Research: Self-Driving Car Production To Hit 14.5 Million A Year By 2025

November 25th, 2016 by James Ayre

The annual production of self-driving cars will hit the 14.5 million mark by 2025, according to a new report from Juniper Research. This rapid production expansion will be driven mostly by so-called “ride-sharing” firms such as Uber and Lyft (on-demand taxi services), the report argues.

What this means is that the research and analysis services firm expects there to be a global installed base for consumer self-driving vehicles of around 22 million by the year 2025 — rising rapidly from only a few thousand self-driving vehicles in 2020.

The report — Autonomous Vehicles & ADAS: Adoption, Regulation & Business Models 2016-2025 — states that the 3 primary drivers of the rapid adoption of consumer self-driving vehicles will be: rapid technological changes, increasingly strict safety specifications for vehicles, and environmental pressures. The primary early adopter of the technology will be city-based, on-demand taxi services, as noted above.

Notably, the report makes the obvious observation that if self-driving vehicle technology is adopted as rapidly as it predicts, then that will result in the redundancy of a great many transportation and shipping industry jobs.

Research author Gareth Owen commented: “The introduction of driverless cars will result in fundamental changes to the automotive world and society in general; and it is clear that the boundaries between private vehicle ownership, car sharing and rental fleets will increasingly become blurred.”

Here’s a bit more from a press release on the matter: “However, the research warned that following the first-ever fatality in an AV vehicle, the recent Tesla S accident in Florida, the AV industry must convince the public that their vehicles are completely safe. … Juniper found that a number of major OEMs including BMW, Toyota, and GM are accelerating their AV development and testing programmes and now have firm plans to launch production vehicles. As a result, Juniper forecasts that driverless vehicles will start to become widespread in the 2020–2025 timeframe, although they will initially be confined to city centres or key routes due to the need for extensive V2X (Vehicle-To-Everything) infrastructure.”

Those interested in finding out more about the research can do so here.











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