By Bradd Libby
If in the past eight years since its publication you have not had the chance to read RethinkX co-founders Tony Seba and James Arbib’s ‘Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries’, now might be a good time, as its assessment of the future of transportation — and the resulting implications for the economy, society, and geopolitics — are just now rapidly starting to unfold.
At its heart, the argument behind Seba and Arbib’s ‘Rethinking Transportation’ (RT) is simple: electric vehicles that can safely drive themselves will be cheap to operate, so cheap that a new business model will arise, Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS), where passengers access on-demand transportation from fleets of autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs), reducing (and eventually, eliminating) the need for human driving and individual vehicle ownership.
These services will start in large cities, Seba and Arbib predicted, but will quickly expand in their range and in the number of vehicles in the fleets, ‘disrupting’ human-driven trips with robotaxi-driven ones.
The sales of internal-combustion powered vehicles will peak and, since electric vehicles will last longer than combustion-based ones and autonomously driven vehicles can operate much longer distances per year than human-driven ones, the sales (and therefore, total number) of all passenger vehicles will peak and then decline.
The switch from the human-operated automobile system we have now to an autonomously operated one, as measured in distance traveled, will be swift (just a decade or so, as judged from economics and from many similar disruptions in the past) and its consequences will be profound.
First, it will threaten the employment of human drivers, like full-time taxi drivers and drivers for ride-hailing services, and spell difficult times for incumbent automobile factories, car dealers, and those involved in car maintenance and insurance. Ultimately, the decline in demand for oil could destabilize entire resource-exporting nations.
However, TaaS will also increase mobility for the elderly, for children and the disabled (even those who are temporarily disabled, as almost everyone is at some point in their life). It will mean less overall spending on automobile travel, putting more money in the pockets of the average household. And it will mean less air pollution and fewer car accidents.
It is easy to forget the state of thinking about electric vehicles (EVs), robotaxis, lithium-ion batteries, renewable energy, and related topics only a few years ago, when when ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published in 2017.
For one, there were no operating robotaxi services at all. When Seba and Arbib were writing, autonomous electric vehicles were essentially science fiction. But since then, services have been launched by Waymo (Google) and Tesla in the US and Baidu and Pony.ai in China, among others. Even the dramatic rise of individually owned, human-driven electric vehicles had not really started.
In 2017, EVs made up just 1.3% of global automobile sales. Despite the revelation in late 2015 that Volkswagen had been cheating on emissions tests, even by 2017 it was still not clear that diesel technology in general was doomed for passenger cars. In Norway, the world’s foremost adopter of EVs, diesel sales still outpaced EV sales in 2017. (EV sales did not surpass diesel sales until the following year, 2018. To date in 2025, diesel sales now account for 1.3% of the new passenger car market in Norway, with fully battery-electric vehicle accounting for about 94% of sales.)
Sales of hybrids (both the plug-in kind and the non-plugin version, sometimes laughably described by their manufacturers as “self-charging” vehicles) peaked in 2020 at more than 30% of the Norwegian market, combined. (Now they are less than 5%.)
In 2017, even passenger cars powered by hydrogen were still being presented on the global stage as a reasonable possibility. Total sales of the Toyota Mirai, introduced in 2014 and now the best-selling hydrogen-powered car worldwide, have only amounted to about 22,000 units in a decade, fewer than the number of battery-electric vehicles sold globally now each day.
Even in China, the world’s largest car market, EV sales in 2017 were only about 1 million units. Total US passenger car sales were about 18 million units. (Now, eight years later, US passenger car sales have slid to about 16 million units, and Chinese EV sales have risen to that same level. Next year, most likely, Chinese EV sales will surpass the total number of all passenger cars sold in the US.)
When it comes to autonomy, specifically, as robotaxi services have started up, critics of these services have been forced to shut down the same handful of arguments they trotted out ad nauseum: that autonomous cars could not handle left-hand turns, that they would always need a safety driver as a backup, or that they would always be expensive to operate due to licensing costs (‘medallions’).
But robotaxi services have launched, starting in large cities as Seba and Arbib said they would. Their ridership and service areas are growing exponentially and if anyone doubts that the incumbent makers of human-driven, combustion-based vehicles will not be impacted by these new technologies, the burden is on them to explain why.
The adoption of electric vehicles has helped to drive down the prices of lithium-ion battery prices, opening up entire new possibilities, like the rise of very-low-cost EVs, electric ships, electric trucks (including autonomous ones, like those by Aurora, which currently on the road), and energy storage systems for the electric grid. All of these things, which were also essentially science fiction when ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, are developing rapidly in their own rights.
What further effects might autonomous, electric vehicles (of all kinds) have in the coming few years? To answer that, we only need to look back through ‘Rethinking Transportation’. One of the potentially biggest impacts Seba and Arbib mention is the use and valuation of land, both in built-up and rural areas. As the number of privately owned vehicles declines, so too will the need for urban parking lots, on-street parking and, in suburban areas, private garages. All could be renovated for other uses. In rural areas, 40% of the corn (maize) grown in the US is used to produce ethanol as a fuel additive, a need that will diminish as the demand for liquid fuels declines.
And the technologies underlying robotaxis — like cheap batteries, sensors and powerful AI systems — are opening new opportunities in robotics, 100% solar-wind-and-battery electric grids, and drones.
These applications seem as fantastical now as autonomous robotaxis did just a few years ago, but are likewise poised to develop just as rapidly.