As more and more consumers choose to use The Mobility Cloud for their transportation needs rather than privately owned vehicles, the market for private car sales in industrialized nations and any other market that’s currently at “peak car” will be gutted. This will happen gradually over the course of several decades. This will also result in the collapse of the used car market in these same markets. Most car sales in industrialized nations will be fleet sales and the total number of cars sold will likely be only a fraction of current sales volume.
How much will sales go down? No one knows for sure but estimates range from Barcley’s suggesting “only” a 40% drop1 to PricewaterhouseCoopers claiming a 99% decrease2 in sales. The wide range between those two estimates suggests the difficulty in quantifying this disruption, but either scenario is an economic disaster for the automobile manufacturing industry. So is this the end of the car manufacturing industry as we know it? Will the automobile industry be just a shadow of what it was in the decades prior to and following the millennium? I think not. See the next section for reasons why the automobile industry may not have reason to fear, and indeed, may be able to grow to levels never before seen as long as they can embrace change and restructure their business quickly enough to produce different product.