Autonomous cars to saturate market within five years

Autonomy is the new buzzword within the global car industry.

Car-makers are keenly spruiking the benefits of added safety, lower insurance premiums and improved convenience in everyday motoring – all from cars that use connected function, radar and camera technology to read their immediate surroundings.

But as for the emergence of the completely driverless, self-driving car? Don’t count your chickens just yet.

That’s the message from Nissan-Mitsubishi-Renault alliance boss Carlos Ghosn, who is visiting Australian operations of the three marques this week.

Ghosn believes that autonomous technology – a wide-spread term covering everything from automated emergency braking to lane assistance – will completely saturate the market in the next four to five years.

“Let’s be clear: autonomous cars are cars where you’re sitting in the car and you decide when you want to drive the car and when you want the car to drive,” he said.

“Driverless cars are a completely different technology because you’re talking about cars without a driver.”

“I see in the next five years, most of the cars on the street will be fitted with some capacity of autonomy. There are different degrees on autonomy: you can have autonomy on the highway, which is much more simply than autonomy in the city, which is much more simple than autonomy in the city in any conditions.

“Connectivity is going to come at a much bigger level. While you have some connectivity today, you’re going to see bigger screens, video conferencing.

“By 2022, which is five years away, most cars on the road will have some kind of autonomy and some kind of connectivity, and the premium market is going to be totally autonomous.”

Ghosn makes a clear distinction when it comes to cars that can drive themselves.

“Self-driving cars are a different story … this will take much more time not only because of the technical challenge but also because of the regulators,” he said, pointing out that taxis and the Uber market are likely to drive demand.

Ghosn expects autonomous cars to go hand-in-hand with electric cars, a market in which his alliance is ranked number one seller globally.

“For the moment, in this competition, we are leading on the electric with the statistic of electric cars produced and sold every year,” he said.

“We don’t think today that there is anything to say Australia is soon going to see electric cars. Why? Because usually electric cars take off when there is a country policy, which exists in China, the United States, France, Japan, the UK and now in Germany.

“Electric cars by definition are more simple to assemble ... as long as electric cars represent less than half a per cent of the industry, it’s very hard for them to compete.

“The subsidies are important to jump start the technology.”

Ghosn held a briefing with government officials this week, but said that he did not directly ask for electric car subsidisation in the Australian market.