McKinsey Report on the future of the Automotive world: too conservative?

Very recently McKinsey & Company, one of the most known and prestigious consulting firm in the world (see for example this ranking: link), published an article and a related report regarding the possible scenarios for the future of the automotive industry, with a specific target date of 2030.

Here you have the links to these interesting resources:

• Article

• Report (PDF format) 

I do agree on most of the possible scenarios presented in the report, but I think that this research took a quite conservative approach regarding the extent of the changes which we are going to see in the next 10-15 years in this industry.

For example, the article is forecasting that "up to 15 percent of new cars sold in 2030 could be fully autonomous" even in the high-disruption scenario (note: fully autonomous cars are defined as requiring "no driver intervention for the entire trip". For a more detailed classification of the level of autonomy in the car, the one made by the NHTSA can be a good resource: link).

There are currently different opinions among industry top leaders regarding how fast the fully autonomous vehicles will be commercially available. For example, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is targeting to have fully autonomous vehicles within 5-6 years (link. Note: he said this in September 2014, so the horizon is now shorter, circa 3-5), while Swamy Kotagiri, CTO of Magna International, predicts a much larger time frame of 20 to 25 years and Volkmar Denner, CEO of Bosch, said "We won't see full autonomy in the next decade"(link. Note: these comments were released during this year CES in Las Vegas).

Many are the obstacles which a fully autonomous car will have to face, the technological ones being only the first ones, but Google has already (since December 2014) a prototype car which is fully autonomous, to the point that there is no steering wheel in the car, thus not allowing to actually intervene and take control of the car in the usual way (safety systems are of course integrated and there is a possibility to manually drive the car). Here some footage of the car created by Google.

 

Although being still a prototype, these cars from Google (including earlier version based on normal vehicles) have driven more than 1 million miles in autonomous mode. Given also the fact that Google is not the only company putting R&D resources on this topic, my personal opinion is that fully autonomous cars will be available (at least in selected regions/areas) quite soon: as such, I do tend to agree with the time frame declared by Elon Musk. Having autonomous cars available as early as 2020, in 10 years there will be the possibility to have a market penetration of more than just 15%.