It’s predicted that by 2050, driverless cars will be a $7 trillion industry, meaning that they’ll potentially have a large impact on emissions and climate concerns. A recent report from UC Davis showed that driverless cars could reduce carbon dioxide emissions due to transportation by over 80 percent worldwide by 2050.
“Automation in transportation is an amazing technology that seemed to come out of nowhere (though in reality it has been cooking for decades),” said Austin Brown, the executive director of the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy at UC Davis, in an email interview. “It is one of those technologies that could change the very fabric of our world (much as the car did originally). Changes of that magnitude always have great benefits but also lead to major unintended consequences. In the research and policy communities, we’re in the challenging business of trying to foresee unintended consequences and get ready for them.”
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