Predicting the road ahead with self-driving cars

According to recent news reports, the UK’s National Wealth Fund (NWF) is planning a significant investment in Oxa, the Oxford-founded autonomous vehicle start-up formerly known as Oxbotica. The company is not alone. Nvidia’s CEO announced a new focus on autonomous vehicles at CES in Las Vegas in January and there has been steady news on the subject from Tesla, Waymo, Uber and Lyft for several years.

Selected cities in the US and China are already seeing the use of commercial driverless services for transport. But is the technology suitable for Europe’s complex roads? Will we really be climbing into robo-taxis in London within two years? And what does it mean for society?

Insurability and regulation are already shaping the market. The UK introduced the Automated Vehicles Act in 2024 as a legal framework to fast-track the development of the market and encourage the start of trials from 2026.

So with 2026 upon us already, here are a few predictions:

1. Self-driving trials make great headlines but are harder than they sound, especially in congested city centres. With this in mind, early UK trials have focused on straightforward point-to-point routes such as airport shuttle buses and off-highway industrial delivery services between warehouses and distribution centres. As the technology matures, trials will develop across cities and towns.
2. Young drivers. High costs, access to social media and long test wait times are already discouraging teenagers from learning to drive. This trend will accelerate with the advent of private hire robo-taxis, especially in places that are not well served by public transport. A generational divide will emerge of people with and without driving skills. This will have a major impact on the automotive industry, first impacting the second-hand market for compact vehicles.
3. Public behaviour – pedestrians will quickly develop an understanding of safety features such as automated braking, which could give them false confidence to forget the green cross code and walk into the road without looking. In turn, drivers of conventional vehicles and cyclists will all need to change their driving behaviours.
4. Passengers will quickly start to demand greater levels of comfort, infotainment (integrated media within cars) or efficiency. Features such as swivelling seats for sociable journeys, individual locking compartments for unmanned deliveries, exercise spaces and workstations. New materials will provide enhanced hygiene or wear-resistance in vehicles designed to carry more passengers and drive more miles than today’s cars. New niche fleet operators will likely also develop, for example self-driving tourers or self-driving sleeper services.
5. Employment. According to a recent government press release, self-driving vehicles could be worth up to £42 billion to the UK. But will some people lose out? Who are the winners and losers? A new self-driving vehicle servicing industry will evolve with players including booking systems and fleet operators. Booking operators will develop add-on services based on passenger data and habits, while today’s car hire companies are well place to pivot into a new role of self-driving fleet operators. Their workforce will evolve with fewer customer-facing roles, and more technology experts in remote monitoring and vehicle servicing roles at depots located close to high-power EV charging stations. Professional drivers will also see an impact. Fewer driving roles will have more responsibility. This has already started, with some last mile delivery drivers already installing or picking up packages as well as dropping off. Drivers of passenger vehicles may need to provide more assistance and share local knowledge.
6. Automotive design will evolve to focus on operational efficiency, with fewer vehicles of higher quality travelling more miles over their lifetime. We’ll see a greater focus on consistent design and production, which is a stark contrast with today’s mass customisation. Large fleet operators will want to rationalise their inventories of spare parts and drive down costs. Lightweight design will become more important as operators seek to maximise range and minimise operating costs.
7. Cities and communities, reducing numbers of cars will shrink demand for car parking, freeing up land for redevelopment and making suburbs feel less crowded. In today’s world, there’s often a race to secure a parking spot. In future, the race will be to secure a spot in a self-driving taxi, with passengers paying a premium for peak time, or booking a spot in a shared service for a discount.
8. Driving for fun. As self-driving technology becomes safer and more reliable than human drivers, insurance for conventional cars will become more expensive and fewer people will drive. This will create a feedback loop, with a more controlled environment for self-driving cars, fewer road accidents. Over time, this will open up new opportunities for lightweighting of vehicle bodies and designing vehicles with panoramic views.
9. Driving for fun – A new market will develop for driving enthusiasts to experience time behind the wheel of classic and legacy vehicles in off-road locations.

The future is already closer than we think and with rapid developments underway, it’s public perception that will slow development down. Multiple studies have found that people are wary of self-driving vehicles, perceiving the lack of a driver as a lack of control. However, the final prediction is that this natural concern can be overcome by seeing and experiencing the autonomous vehicles in person.