Motley Fool Money - Rethinking Transportation

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

When are the self-driving electric cars going to flood our streets and highways? Tony Seba, co-founder of the independent think tank RethinkX, believes it will happen sooner than most do. Part of his rationale has to do with how many companies and organizations he believes will be pushing for it to happen.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With the Motley Full Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. When looking at business battles, sometimes it's helpful to widen your gaze. Take the future of driving, for example. On the surface, it's easy to look at automakers in Detroit on one side and Tesla on the other. Tony Siba is the co-founder of an independent think tank called RethinkX. In 2017, they published a report about self-driving electric vehicles. And when Tony and I talked, he pointed out. pointed out that the competitive landscape is much bigger and involves many more players than one might think.

If you look at the gains from the transition to transport as a service, and also if you look at the companies that they're going to be pushing back against, the largest companies in the world by market capitalization are getting Google, Amazon, Apple, and so on, are basically getting into this game, so into this game, into this industry. So essentially, it's not gonna be just the large oil companies versus the little hippies doing an electric vehicle. It's going to be the large oil companies versus Apple and Google

and Tesla and then Amazon and so on. And then on top of that, when you look at the idea that transport as a service is going to provide cheap, accessible transportation to a lot of groups that door-to-door, to a lot of groups who have been left out of the car ownership or even the public transportation system, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. There you have it. You're going to have, you know, oil companies on one side, and you're going have Apple and Amazon and AARP and groups loving for disabled and so on on the other side. So it's going to be a big fight. It's not going to be a one-way fight in that respect.

If you want to learn more about how Tony Siba and his colleagues are rethinking transportation, just go to rethinkex.com. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.