Intel Sees Self-Driving Cars Creating $7 Trillion ‘Passenger Economy’ by 2050
LOS ANGELES -- Intel estimates autonomous vehicles will form a $7 trillion “passenger economy” by 2050 that includes creating “immersive media” for in-car consumption “when us drivers become idle passengers,” said Doug Davis, senior vice president-Intel Automated Driving Group, in a SMPTE conference keynote Monday. The 2050 estimate doesn’t include “the value of the cars,” he said.
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“Think about ubiquitous connectivity” in the context of autonomous driving, said Davis. “Think about smartphones, and how they created all new economies. I contend that autonomous vehicles are going to do the same thing.” Intel thinks “the rise of autonomous cars will be the most ambitious project of our collective lifetime,” said Davis. “It will also be one of the most positive societal forces that technology can unleash” through 2050, “because it’s going to save lives,” he said.
The opportunities are “endless” for “new industries to take advantage of the additional time and space all consumers will have” when self-driving cars become mainstream, said Davis. Intel is teaming with Warner Bros. to create what the companies call “the autonomous vehicle entertainment experience,” he said. The collaboration is developing the “first of its kind concept car to demonstrate what entertainment could look like in the future,” he said. “As we shift from being drivers to riders, that connected device time is going to increase significantly, and content consumption will go up pretty dramatically.”
Various surveys are finding that consumers “are downright scared” about the prospect of riding in “robotic cars,” said Davis. Yet “humans kill 1.3 million people globally every year because of our poor driving skills,” he said. “So we honestly believe computers can do a better job than that. We have an opportunity to help educate consumers about how these technologies work.”
Intel thinks the “key” to getting consumers “to let go of their fears” of autonomous driving is to “create transparency between the human and the machine,” said Davis. “People have to know what the car is going to do in an unsafe situation.” Intel is proposing what it calls a “responsibility sensitive safety model” to promote a “cross-industry discussion” that will “formalize the human notion of safe driving” and apply it to autonomous cars, he said.
SMPTE Notebook
With the rise of autonomous cars, Deloitte Consulting projects that “vehicle-based media consumption” will exceed 52 billion hours globally in 2030 and will be double that in 2040, said Managing Director Greg Merchant. “We aren’t that far away from your commute becoming one of the most entertaining times of your day,” he said. “It is not just about consumption. You’re talking about new experiences that are going to be crafted.” OLED technology “is moving the market at large closer to a genuine immersive 360-degree experience that will change the way you interact with video,” he said. The rollout of 5G networks “will make live broadcasts into vehicles an everyday commonplace occurrence,” he said.