Driverless cars, the future?

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, my first priority was to get a car – then I could have total independence to come and go as I pleased.
I could go on a date or pick up friends, drive to the Boardwalk, snack on a Sandae or chocolate-dipped banana, then drive home.
Today, the experience of driving isn’t much different. The traffic is worse and the cars have more gadgets, but I still drive myself to where I’m going, park, then go home and park in my driveway, where the car will sit until my next trip. 
Meanwhile, technology has radically changed nearly everything else in my life:  the way I get information, the way I shop, communicate, and get entertainment and news. But driving seems stalled in the ‘70s.
That is about to change. Driverless cars are coming. They will arrive in fleets and change our lives.
Today’s teens are less obsessed with having a car. Their lives center more on their phones.  They look at the thousands of dollars it costs to buy, insure, maintain, register, fuel and park a car that will sit idle 95% of the time, and a car seems like a waste of money.
Add the fact that young people working today have lower incomes than my generation had, adjusted for inflation, and far more debt, thanks to ballooning student loans, and you get a generation less eager to spend a fortune for the pride of owning a car.
Enter Uber. If you don’t have a car, you can get where you need to by punching a few buttons on your phone. Seventy percent of Uber’s cost goes to paying drivers. Imagine how cheap it will be to use a ride-hailing service when they no longer have to pay drivers?
At the other end of society from teens are the elderly. People are living longer. Once they lose the ability to drive, they lose their independence and often need to move to assisted living. Driverless networks will keep them in their homes longer.
How soon will this happen? Experts say by the mid-‘20s, but I’ll bet it happens sooner, just like the information revolution of the ‘90s happened faster than anyone expected. Corporations across the globe are racing to introduce the first driverless networks.
This raises many question:  For investors, what companies will profit from the driverless economy? For workers, what will happen to all the people employed as drivers? For city planners, what to do with all those empty parking lots and driveways? Will the DMV be converted to a coffee bar?
I will explore these questions in future columns.
Mark Rosenberg is a financial adviser with Western International Securities in Scotts Valley, a member of FINRA and SIPC. He can be reached at 831-439-9910 or [email protected].