10 businesses to run in the autonomous vehicles ecosystem
These fleets of vehicles will be able to do many things, but they will probably need help especially in the early stages.
1. Towing and recharging service
To recover lost vehicles or dead battery situations
2. Charging, maintenance and detailing facilities/warehouses
Vehicles could automatically come back to this homebase and with a combination of human and robotic assistance, be cleaned, charged, and maintained. At first, they might resemble Taxi warehouses.
3. Ride service arbitrage app
This would be a single app where you could request autonomous cars across a number of vendors and sort based on price, or time. it could be supported by monthly fee, paid for by the user and potentially advertising fees for preferred placement or advertising space.
4. Legal specialists for accidents on both sides
You would need to have an understanding of the laws that would affect an autonomous vehicle owner, and also representing human beings or other autonomous vehicles that were injured
5. Specialized insurance companies
There are different levels of risk in an autonomous vehicle that drives around the clock.
6. Software as a service to match vehicles with tasks: vehicle brokerage
The broker's role would be to maximize the utilization of the vehicle. A service that would match your Tesla and route it for commuting tasks during the day, grocery delivery in the middle of the day, meal delivery at night, nightclub driving, and then long-haul delivery overnight.
7. Companies that retrofit vehicles for additional capabilities
You could add robotic arms to a sedan so that it could potentially put packages into a box or load itself from a warehouse. With a driverless car, you could put a different body on a Tesla frame, for example, that would be a gigantic box for package deliveries or dry cleaning.
8. Vehicle subscriptions
Sign up to get regular personal commuting every day, or children to soccer practice/picked up from school as a subscription.
9. Last Mile integration
For a large truck or over land train, this crew breaks packages into their final destinations and does last mile deliveries, also with drones or autonomous vehicles.
10. Containerization
Like containerization that allows the same container to go on a ship and then be loaded onto a train or truck, this can be done at a smaller scale with electric drive systems. A standardized "grocery container" could be loaded in a warehouse and delivered to a powered outlet at your residence. Or a "travel pod" like a living room or office that could be loaded from car to train as you travel on a longer journey.
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