The president of one of the oldest car manufacturers in the U.S. doesn’t think you’ll be driving its cars in the near future. That’s because they’ll be driving you.

“We see more change in the next five years than there’s been in the last 50,” said Dan Ammann, president of General Motors GM, -1.31% , in an interview. Ammann sat down with MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday to discuss the company’s recent acquisitions and the road ahead for transportation technology. (MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal are both units of News Corp NWS, +2.11% . )

Specifically, the shift in consumer behavior from car ownership to ride sharing will drive the development of self-driving cars and electric vehicles, Ammann said. As people drive less — vehicles spend only about 5% of the time on the road, he estimates — and the opportunity cost of driving increases with the inability to perform tasks on a mobile device while driving, consumers will gradually turn to ride-sharing and ride-hailing services. In January, GM announced a $500 million investment in ride-hailing company Lyft.

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However, this shift won’t happen overnight, and it does not signal an end to the company’s popular trucks and SUVs, he said. Self-driving cars need to be able to operate “in an everyday, existing on-the-road kind of environment,” Ammann said. “The average age of a car on the road is 11 years. This is a decades-long transition.”

Companies like Uber and Lyft continue to grow their user bases, which makes them ideal platforms to introduce self-driving technology, Ammann said. “We think that the intersection of rideshare and driverless cars…will represent the next fundamental wave of change,” he said. “It will change the cost structure of rideshare, make it much lower cost and potentially open up the demand pretty significantly, well beyond where it is today.”

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Driverless cars are also much more efficient than taxis and other ride-hailing vehicles currently on the road. A self-driving car operated by a ride-hailing service could generate revenue 85% of the time it spends on the road, compared with the current rate of 49% for New York City taxis and 53% for UberX vehicles, according to a March report by Deutsche Bank.

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Despite its cost benefits, American drivers are generally skeptical of driverless technology. However, the relative safety of self-driving cars compared with human drivers will eventually convince consumers to embrace the technology, Ammann said. “Driverless technology should be fundamentally safer than human drivers given the very high percentage of car accidents that are caused by human error,” he said. “Driverless cars don’t drink.”

The highest increase in vehicle deaths in 50 years — 8% — occurred in 2015, according to the National Safety Council. More than 38,000 people were killed in accidents and 4.4 million were injured, costing $412.1 billion in damages, according to the agency.

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Along with more ride-hailing and self-driving cars, electric vehicles will also soon become more prevalent, Ammann said. Though low oil prices have kept current demand low, the introduction of more affordable electric vehicles with greater battery range will help pick up their adoption, he said. “We believe this will represent the first next step in the acceptance of electric vehicles.”

The timeline of these transitions is still unclear, Ammann said, but they are inevitable. “I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt that change is happening,” he said. “There’s a lot of debate on the time, the time scale, the magnitude, the how, the who, the where. But there’s enough fundamental forces at work as to why this would change.”