To hit over 22 million consumer vehicles on the road by 2025
The annual production of self-driving cars will reach 14.5 million in 2025, up significantly from only a few thousands in 2020, to give a global installed base of more than 22 million consumer vehicles by 2025.
Heavy investments from ride sharing companies such as Uber, Didi Chuxing and Lyft, as well as tech giants like Google and Baidu, are driving future growth according to the research.
In a new study from Juniper Research, it was found that the market adoption of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is set to accelerate over the next few years, driven by: increasingly stringent vehicle safety specifications; environmental pressures; and rapid technological developments.
The research found that driverless vehicles will have a disruptive impact on transportation around the world and will ultimately lead to millions of professional drivers being made redundant. Juniper predicts that city-based taxi services will be one of the key early adopters of driverless vehicles.
Research author Gareth Owen added: “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.”
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 to 2025 timeframe, although they will initially be confined to city centres or key routes due to the need for extensive vehicle-to-everything (V2X) infrastructure.
