The Future of Transportation Seems To Be Avoiding a Central Question

If there is one single most important ability one takes away from business school, it’s the ability to conceive of the world in quadrants and to publish reports based on these perceptions.  You know what I mean:  Perhaps the Y-axis is affordability and the X-axis is functionality.   Only the dinosaurs are in the lower-left quadrants (unaffordable products with limited functionality); everyone wants his product to be placed in the upper right—as far up and as far to the right as possible. I’m sure I will not live to see the day that these representations (normally oversimplifications) fall out of favor.  Here’s one, offered by an analyst at Morgan Stanley, that attempts to summarize the auto industry and its movement in the direction of autonomous vehicles that are shared, rather than owned.   According to the analyst, the good stuff, as always, lies in the upper right quadrant, where in this case the asset (car, truck, taxi, etc.) is both shared and autonomous, making everything in all other quadrants obsolete.

It’s hard to disagree with the claim that the lower left-hand quadrant, i.e., owned vehicles with human drivers, is in fact, rapidly becoming obsolete.  For those who may not have gotten the message intuitively, the analyst offered a few words of help:  “100-year-old model”; that’s never a cheery note on one of these graphics. In truth, I don’t deny that any of this is happening.  My only note is that, for some reason, we seem to be in such a hurry to replace the driver that, in my estimation, we’ve abandoned a concept that is much more important to our civilization: abandoning the (crude oil-based) fuel.  It’s a bit strange to me that no one is talking about the true cause of so much death, disease, and environmental devastation associated with transportation: our dependence on petroleum.