The Apple Watch, Uber, and Robotic Car Service

Tech Crunch: “When you open the Uber app on your Apple Watch, it goes straight to a screen showing how long it’ll be until a car can come get you — no pulling out your phone to drop pins or choose between Uber X, Uber Pool, or black car service.”

The efficiencies of ride sharing will get another boost, on the supply side, when Uber and Google will substitute robots for drivers. Here’s the forecast from ABI:

Car and ride sharing is just one example of the new on-demand economy allowing real-time matching of supply and demand through connected smartphone applications. According to ABI Research, successive forms of vehicle sharing approaches represent paradigm shifts in uptake and popularity; each new generation seeing adoption rates at least an order of magnitude larger than the previous:

• Car Sharing 1.0 – Street Rental Service: Cars parked on the street can be located, unlocked, used, and left behind. Examples: Zipcar, car2go, DriveNow.
• Car Sharing 2.0 – Ride Sharing Taxi Service and Carpooling: Private drivers picking up customers using their privately owned vehicles. Examples: Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, Carpooling.com, BlaBlaCar.
• Car Sharing 3.0 – Robotic Car Service: Driverless cars which can be called remotely and used without a driver on board.