Will driverless vehicles make every car a rental?

According to the AA, a new car starts diminishing in value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt. By the time you’ve been pootling around in it for a year, it might have lost as much as 40% of its value. Three years later, and your car’s value could have dropped by as much as 60%. Add in the fact that cars in the UK typically spend about 96% of their time parked up, and owning a car starts looking like a pretty hefty, inefficient expense. This cost is just one of the reasons that’s been suggested for a dramatic drop in car ownership in the UK. Of course, plenty of people do still own cars – and there are any number of reasons why that’s still the case. For some it’s convenience, for some pleasure, and for many people it’s simply the only viable way to get around. But what if it was possible to alter the traditional ownership model entirely? What if, instead of owning a car, you could simply access a vehicle on a need-to-use basis? Or, if you did want to continue having a car of your own, you could balance out some of the running costs and depreciation by hiring your vehicle out to others when you weren’t using it? Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to come up with those ideas, and there are already a number of businesses that exist in the growing grey area between vehicle ownership and traditional rentals. But what happens when you throw connected and autonomous vehicles into that mix? Well, listen on, and you might just find out…