This article first appeared on the BNEF mobile app and the Bloomberg Terminal.
- 10% of car sales in 2040 expected to be robotaxis
- Robotaxi fleet in same year to exceed 20 million
Sales of completely autonomous cars will scale rapidly from the mid-2030s, according to BloombergNEF. Most of these so-called Level-4 autonomous vehicles will be deployed as robotaxis in shared services like Uber, Didi, Lyft and General Motors’ Cruise, among others.
Robotaxis are already being piloted for the public in a handful of cities by the likes of Alphabet Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu in China. These services will expand to new areas in the coming years as testing accelerates.
Numerous edge cases still have to be solved for robotaxis to be deployed in a broad range of different traffic situations and weather conditions, but favorable economics could enable fast growth once the underlying technology is well developed.
Robotaxis are best-suited to cities, where high population density plus parking restrictions, traffic jams and emission standards make shared and electric autonomous transport attractive to consumers and policymakers alike.
For more on these trends, see BNEF’s annual Long-Term Electric Vehicle Outlook.
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