There is a quiet revolution going on in transportation. I'm going to be doing a program about it soon, looking at how commercial transport is evolving and what that means for the future of transport. What we are seeing is companies working together to provide services to their customers. Often the companies compete directly with each other in the marketplace, but work together in delivering the service. Let me give you some examples.
In the past, if you were a courier company, you'd have your own fleet of delivery drivers. Each driver would cover a geographic area and make between 50-80 deliveries a day. In the process, he might travel anywhere from 80-200 miles. Of course, yours would not be the only courier company on the street - there would be a dozen others doing the same thing.
What we're starting to see now in some areas is the emergence of 'super depots' where multiple courier companies all work from the same depot and the delivery drivers handle deliveries from multiple couriers. In this scenario, each driver would cover a much smaller geographical area, but every time he turns up on a street to make a delivery, he'll make three or four deliveries rather than just one. As a result, a delivery driver will make between 150-200 deliveries a day, but only drive 15-25 miles.
The result is much higher efficiency and reduced numbers of vehicles on the road. From an electric vehicle perspective, it means that delivery drivers could now use electric vehicles as the required range is so much lower.
Another example: engineers. If you were a company that needed a fleet of mobile engineers on the road to maintain equipment, you traditionally used to have your own employed engineers to do the work. Over the course of a year, a mobile engineer may need to travel 50,000-80,000 miles a year in the course of his job, going from one site to the next to fix faulty equipment.
What is more likely to happen now is that you would contract out your maintenance to a maintenance company. Because the maintenance company handles repairs for lots of different companies, they would have far more engineers than any individual company could afford to have, which means a greater density of engineers across the country, shorter service response times and so on. As a result, an engineer is likely to only travel 5,000-8,000 miles a year in the course of his job. In busy cities such as London or Chicago, the engineers might not even have a car - using the subway to get around.
I am convinced that over the next ten years, we're going to see much more of this collaborative working. Think of travelling sales forces or computer technicians, or countless other roles that could be done more efficiently if you cut out the travelling. At some point, I would expect to see that start to have a knock-on effect into the way we view vehicles and the way we use them for our personal use. Long distance journeys will become much rarer than they are at the present.
Some people talk about electric cars as a 'disruptive technology' - i.e. a technology that transforms the way we look at what we do as a society and makes a change: the emergence of the internet is probably the greatest example of this. Disruptive technology can wipe out the existing players in a market with a new generation of products.
There is a lot of debate within the industry as to whether electric cars are a disruptive technology or not. A lot of people think they aren't, because at the end of the day it is just another car and we'll use them in the same way. My belief is that electric cars are a disruptive technology, because we won't use them in the same way, and the way we'll end up using cars will be completely at odds with using gasoline.
