The benefits from the car users and the taxi corporation’s point of view from having a fully self-driving car for transport are so huge that even Tesla will be in trouble if they can’t get this technology out before most others are able to do it. Once these fully autonomous cars arrive in 2020 there will be exponentially decreasing demand for cars that are not fully autonomous even if they are made by Tesla.

From a production point of view for an auto-producer to make all their cars fully autonomous once the technology is developed will take very little time even for a huge car maker like VW that makes 10 million cars per year. All the components needed for autonomous driving (sensors, cables and CPUs) can be scaled for mass production in the 10s of millions in less than 2 years. Fitting censors, CPUs and cabling to existing car models may take 4 years for a mass producer like VW or GM. So when this autonomous tech hit the real world market in about 2020 it is not going to take forever to scale it to all cars made by any car maker that has the technology. Those automakers not getting this technology shortly after 2020 will therefore bankrupt as there will be no demand for their cars.

This short lead-time to implement fully self-driving tech for cars is much shorter than the lead-time to go from making 10 million gassers to making 10 million long-range BEVs as the latter will require the construction of about 15 to 20 50Giga watt hour battery factories and that will take at least 10 years to build even if capital and demand is not an issue.

So my conclusion is that we will see a world of driverless cars many years (at least 10 years) before we will see a world of clean, inexpensive and battery electric long-range cars. However, it is also driverless tech that will make long-range BEVs triumph over gassers in terms of usability and costs so driverless tech is clearly accelerating the time it takes for the global auto industry to go all battery electric.