The advent of autonomous cars will have a direct and proportional increase on alcohol consumption in developed nations as motorists decide to have one more drink before driving.
According to a new study by Morgan Stanley, a global financial services company, alcohol sales could increase by $100 billion per annum by 2025 as motorists worry less about drink-driving.
"Shared and autonomous vehicle technology help address the mutual exclusivity of drinking and driving in a way that can significantly enhance the growth rate of the alcohol market and on-trade sales at restaurants," said the research paper.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley predict the advent of self-driving cars will see consumers imbibing – at the very least – one extra standard drink per week. And it could be even higher for those in cities.
"Would be drivers who reside in cities where shared mobility is well penetrated are likely to consume more than 1 additional drink per week, in our view," states the research paper.
The research paper cites ride-sharing services – think Uber – in tandem with autonomous vehicles as fuelling alcohol consumption, but according to autonomous car experts such as Jochen Haab, the head of active safety, validation and testing at Mercedes-Benz R&D, fully autonomous vehicles are decades, not years away.
The research assumes that impending laws concerning self-driving vehicles, which are currently being debated by law makers in the USA and Europe and other global regions, will allow the driver to be drunk.
This is a grey area. Although fully autonomous cars won't require drivers to have any direct input, most will retain a steering wheel and it's likely many countries will legislate that drivers must still have a prescribed blood-alcohol limit whether they are driving the car or it is driving them.
There is the potential for driverless cars to make the roads safer as highly intoxicated drivers opt for autonomous drive mode rather than operate a vehicle themselves, and alcohol consumption may well soar as a result of autonomous cars.
However, while it's likely to become a hotly debated topic, the legality of drink-driving is unlikely to change with the advent of autonomous cars.