Do people want self-driving cars? Do companies? Why are auto manufacturers canceling orders?

AAA’s director of automotive engineering and industry relations dropped a bomb in the Center for Automotive Research’s Management Briefing Seminars with a study and an opinion that most auto manufacturers didn’t want to hear. He stated, “There’s just no business case for full autonomy for individual ownership”. His statement might be easy to dismiss but the evidence he brought with him is pretty convincing. AAA did a survey of their 62 million customers and found that only 18% of people wanted “self-driving capability” and the feature their customers are looking for most is safety, with 77 of respondents stating that want safer vehicles. The executive told the auto industry, “let’s do a better job of the safety technologies that people can go out and purchase today, the features they really want and are willing to pay for”. You can tell that he does not work for one of the US automotive manufacturers. I’m not sure that consumers’ wants are really discussed in this industry. I feel that after the government bailout in 2008, companies that were making vehicles that no one wanted to buy, reaffirmed the notion of doing what the government wants instead of the consumers. Remember the old Pontiac Aztecs and Chrysler PT Cruisers? These vehicles made it to market despite being universally hated by most of the population. You can see this going on right now with electric cars. Over two-thirds of Americans do not want an electric car but the government is pushing a 100% EV transition so that is what the auto manufacturers have been spending billions of dollars on instead of listening to the people that actually buy their products.

So what do I think of total vehicle automation in terms of company vehicles? I can think of a few use cases where it would be good and a ton of situations where it would hinder the ability of a crew to do work. For instance,  I think a cab company operating 100% autonomous vehicles makes perfect sense. These vehicles stick to roads and their only job is to pick up and transport people. This however is not the fact for most companies operating vehicles. For any company that uses equipment out of their vehicles like cranes, compressors, tool boxes and things like that, not being able to have fine control over where or how the vehicle is parked and the inability to take a vehicle off the road would be a complete deal breaker.

Are you or your company waiting for new vehicles that you have on order?  You might want to reach out to your dealership to see if those orders are still valid or if they have been canceled.  It seems like every day I get new cancellation notifications from GM and Ford some of our customers that have more than 1000 vehicles in their fleets have had as many as 88% of their vehicle orders canceled so far and even our government customers have had about half of their orders cut as well.  Keep in mind some of these companies have not been able to order vehicles for almost 2 years and it does not seem like the built-up demand will be alleviated anytime soon. This is also pretty frustrating when you see that the same companies that can’t produce a work truck are spending billions on EV and autonomous technology and forsaking the people that buy their products today. Dodge seems to be the only manufacturer that is still taking fleet orders at this time but that is not to say that they won’t come back and cancel them later. So much for the articles a few weeks ago basically claiming the microchip shortage was over.