Annual car production will drop forever

Even as the population of the world continues to increase, it seems likely that car production will never be this high again. In fact, annual car production peaked in 2017 and is already in a slow decline.

There are a lot of factors behind this, but ride-sharing and urban growth (and related public transit) are the two big ones. I personally use ride sharing services quite a bit (well, COVID aside) and have even toyed with the idea of getting rid of my car and exclusively using those. I’m not there yet, but it’s coming.

Fewer cars, but just as much traffic

You may be ahead of me and see where this going. Even with car production dropping, traffic is likely to be awful in major cities for a long time to come. There will be fewer cars purchased, but just as many (if not more) on the road — each car will just be utilized to a much greater degree.

Most cars sit in a driveway, garage or parking lot at least 90% of the time. Even if you have a one-hour commute each way, that’s only 8% of your day.

However, a ride sharing service like Uber can have cars in use for huge chunks of the day. You could have 20 people stop owning a car and they could be replaced by a single Uber driver. Ownership in that group would be down by 95%, but traffic remains the same.

Self-driving cars

This gets a bit more interesting when ride-sharing services start using self-driving cars…