READER'S BLOG: Your next car will be no car

My previous rantings were on why you're next car would be a 'Tesla' (which some people took slightly too literally but hey, it broke the ice ).

Now it's time to take a look at your next car after the Tesla...

Some disclaimers first. This will apply least to you. You will be one of the last people to have the steering wheel pried out of your hands, if ever. So you may not like this but it will happen anyway.

As I wrote last time, one of the problems Tesla and any other newcomer to the market faces is that becoming a serious competitor to the big players means ramping up to a massive scale of production as quickly as possible. It's just not something you can do overnight. That's why you don't hear of new car manufacturers appearing every day (and when you do their plans sound crazy).

But what we're starting to see glimpses of is not a future where someone builds 'a better car' but the upending of what 'transport' means altogether.

As I'm sure you've already guessed this is going to happen because of autonomous cars. If the incumbent manufacturers see EVs as a scary prospect for their business, these must scare the absolute crap out of them.

The big reason? It's going to lead to dramatically lower numbers of cars on the road. A paper from the University of Texas modelled this at up to a 90 per cent reduction in the global car fleet! In the future you'll take a very cheap ride in an autonomous car that is on the road 24/7 – instead of owning your own car that barely gets driven.

Last year there were 72 million cars sold; if that turned into 7.3 million instead, most manufacturers would be left with the kind of production capacity glut that would just obliterate them. Obviously they have not had any incentive to bring this future about on their own, but – as the Mercedes deal with Uber shows – now that the likes of Tesla, Google and others have made it inevitable, the race is on to be first and try to own all of what is likely to be a much smaller market. This is why Tesla doesn't have to worry about reaching the same level of mass-production scale as say VW; they'll never need to.

I don't know who will win this race, probably someone we've never heard of, but it's going to be a very different world.

So where does that leave us? I think it's a beginning, not the end. I've read that people feared what would happen to horses once they 'had no value', but the lives of horses in the current era have never been better, and people who love them can truly enjoy riding them.

I think the same will be true for driving enthusiasts. It will have to be at a track or some sort of "self drive recreation park" but there you'll be able to keep a small collection (remember they'll be practically worthless to anyone other than die hards) of otherwise "discarded" cars that you can truly enjoy owning and driving. I don't know about you but that sounds much better than getting around Sydney in peak hour traffic.

So here's to the future. What will be in your weekend collection?

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Guest Blogger: JWM