The Future of Mobility

Key findings

Further breakthroughs are advancing the introduction of autonomous vehicles, and driverless cars is expected to become a commercial reality. Young adults, along with urbanites, are gravitating toward a model of personal mobility consumption based on pay-per-use, which fundamentally challenges today’s consumption model centered on personal ownership of cars. A system that has been well established for a century is on the verge of a major transformation that could result in the emergence of a new ecosystem of personal mobility. The followings are the main takeaways from this collection.

• At Deloitte, we’ve been engaged in a deep and broadly ranging study of the extended auto industry, the economics of alternative future states, and the potential impact of each on related industries. We have concluded that change will happen systematically—a rising tide, not a tsunami. The new personal mobility ecosystem will likely emerge unevenly across geographic, demographic, and other dimensions, and evolve in phases over time.

• We envision four different personal mobility futures emerging from the intersection of two critical trends, i.e. Vehicle control (driver versus autonomous) and Vehicle ownership (private versus shared). Our analysis concludes that the four future states may well exist simultaneously. That means some region will have an incremental change with current mobility model, and some will have car sharing and driverless vehicles prevailing, also with some enter into a new age of accessible autonomy.

• According to our calculations, personally owned vehicles today impose costs of approximately $0.97 per mile (this includes vehicle depreciation, financing, insurance, and fuel, as well as the value of the individual driver’s time). A fully scaled shared-service model would cost approximately $0.63 per mile. If personally owned autonomous-drive vehicles become widely adopted, it costs approximately $0.46 per mile. And in a world of autonomous shared vehicles, cost per mile could drop as low as $0.31 for single-person trips—in other words, lower by roughly two-thirds than the cost of driving today.

• In the course of changes towards the future of mobility, Deloitte believes a new mobility ecosystem could spark a “virtual” value chain in which the ability to capture, aggregate, and analyze mobility-related data becomes a tremendous source of value. In this vision, value will accrete to those who provide end-to-end seamless mobility, manage the mobility network operating system, and holistically create and manage the in-vehicle experience.

• The shift from the current auto ecosystem to the future mobility ecosystem will bring tremendous changes to all the stakeholders along the automotive value chain. OEMs will need to determine if they should evolve from a fixed capital production, first-transaction, product-sale business into one centered on being an end-to-end mobility services provider, or at a minimum, they will need to weigh how to meet the needs from consumers on increasingly use of shared mobility, and highly tailored, customized, personally owned autonomous-drive vehicles. Automotive suppliers will also have to adjust as OEMs transform.