Are we approaching the end of automotive era?

With autonomous and electric cars gaining popularity, people believe that these cars will soon take place of the human-driven vehicles.

Companies such as Tesla, Google, Uber, Ford, Lyft and General Motors are already testing and creating their own autonomous vehicles which will soon be seen going around on roads. The former Vice-Chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, believes that considering the current situation of the growing autonomous cars, we are approaching the end of automotive era.

“The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans, and for the past 120 years, it has been the automobile. Now, we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules,” Lutz wrote in an article published by Automotive News.

GM calls Musk’s self-driving claims as ‘crap’

He says that the shift to the self-driving cars would impact consumers completely by the next 15-20 years with almost 30% of autonomous vehicles. This will in turn make people realize that these cars are much safe than the general ones. According to Lutz, human-driven vehicles will then be made illegal on roads and the car owners would either have to scrap their vehicles or trade them.

“I won’t be around to say, ‘I told you so,’ though if I do make it to, I could no longer drive anyway because driving will be banned. So my timing once again is impeccable,” expressed the 85-year-old Lutz.

He says that the automotive retailers should ‘kiss the good times goodbye’ as majority of the transport in future would be owned by ‘Ubers and Lyfts and God knows what other companies that will enter the transportation business in the future’.

Moreover, according to Futurism, Lutz prediction about this is supported by various actions and claims by other companies. Google’s Waymo is to launch a self-driving car service in the upcoming months, Toyota claims that they will have intelligent cars by 2020, California will permit autonomous cars on roads by next year and NVIDIA believes that we are just four years away from totally autonomous cars.