Editor’s Note: Today, we complete our ongoing series on the incredible new technologies reshaping our world (and how to profit from them)…
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From Chris Wood, editor, Casey Extraordinary Technology: Mary Ward was the first person to die in a car accident.
The year was 1869, and you could barely call the vehicle a car. It was a newly invented steam-powered carriage traveling down a small street in Ireland.
Describing the accident, her driver, Richard Biggs, said he “felt a slight jolt and saw Mrs. Ward fall.” According to Biggs, the carriage had inexplicably lurched forward and thrown Mary Ward from her seat onto the ground.
Of course, Mary Ward wasn’t the last person to die in a car accident…
Worldwide, there are 1.2 million car crash fatalities every year. And that doesn’t even begin to account for the millions more who are injured in car wrecks, or the property damage and pain suffered by loved ones.
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The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. cost $836 billion annually in “economic loss and societal harm.”
Sad to say, people are the main cause of these crashes. The Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank based in Washington D.C., notes that “driver error is believed to be the main reason behind over 90 percent of all crashes.”
But there’s a way to prevent a lot of these accidents and save thousands, if not millions, of lives…
I’m talking about self-driving cars.
Whether we call it an autonomous vehicle, a self-driving car, or a driverless car, it’s a pretty simple concept… It’s a vehicle that gathers information about its environment and uses that information to drive without help from a person.
In other words, an autonomous vehicle (AV) senses, thinks, and acts to get from point A to point B. And it does all this while following traffic laws and operating safely.
No single technology makes AVs possible. Instead, an integrated set of cameras, sensors, computers, and software work together to take over the sensing, thinking, and driving capacity of a person.
You’ve probably heard of Google’s self-driving cars. To date, they’ve driven across more than 2.1 million miles of California, Texas, Washington, and Arizona roads. But Google isn’t the only company testing AVs on public roads.
In 2014, a BMW 5-series prototype drove itself down the Autobahn in Germany at over 100 miles per hour. In January 2015, a self-driving Audi A7 took itself 550 miles from San Francisco to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Many insiders expect these cars to hit the market soon.
But before they become mainstream, we need more capable and cheaper sensors, better GPS technology, more extensive digital maps, and more powerful software that can adapt to all weather conditions.
Meanwhile, that software has to be perfect. It can’t be buggy. It can’t freeze or crash. After all, lives are at stake. AV software is going to take a long time to develop and a long time to test.
And there are other issues to consider like hacking, pushback over lost jobs from anyone who drives for a living, lost revenue from speeding tickets and other traffic and parking violations that the government won’t want to part with, and regulation at all levels of government.
The automotive industry is already one of the most highly regulated industries on the planet. Just imagine what will happen when people don’t drive the cars anymore.
Think about what true self-driving cars have to be able to do before they become commonplace. They have to be so safe that you (and the government) would put your 8-year-old daughter in one and let it take her to school without you. I don’t see that happening soon. In fact, I don’t think true consumer AVs will be widespread for another 40 years… though we’ll see them much sooner than that in farming, industrial applications, and trucking.
But as investors, it doesn’t really matter if self-driving cars are further away than most people think. There will still be plenty of opportunities to invest in companies developing AV technology and those working on improving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
Today, ADAS includes:
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Adaptive cruise control, which monitors the speed of the vehicle directly ahead of it and maintains a safe distance.
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Parallel park assist, which uses cameras and ultrasonic sensors to guide the car into a parking space.
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Automatic emergency braking, which activates when the car risks colliding with something in front of it.
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Lane keeping technology, which warns the driver when the car risks drifting out of its lane.
There’s enormous growth potential in this market.
Multinational professional services firm Deloitte reports that the U.S. automotive industry generates $760 billion in annual revenue. That’s 4.5% of annual U.S. GDP.
Meanwhile, the ADAS market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23% over the next five years, according to Allied Market Research. At that rate, it will reach $60.14 billion by 2020.
The already massive automotive industry, combined with huge expected growth in ADAS technology, should create a lot of opportunities for investors in ADAS and AV stocks soon.
That’s why now is the time to start looking for innovative tech companies that can improve ADAS and AV technology.
Reeves’ Note: Chris has identified another technology trend what’s poised to be even bigger than driverless cars… free and unlimited energy.
He recently put together a report about two of the most promising companies in this space… which is expected to grow by 16,566% in the coming years.
Learn the best way to get in on the trend right here.
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