U.S.-based ride-hailing platform Lyft recently announced its acquisition of FreeNow, a mobility platform jointly owned by German automotive giants BMW and Mercedes-Benz, for €175 million (approximately NT$6.47 billion). This move is seen as a crucial stepping stone for Lyft’s entry into the European market, and it also reflects the increasingly blurred lines between traditional automakers and emerging mobility platforms in the global wave of digital transformation in the auto industry.

The revenue of sharing mobility around the world is predicted to grow by 20% CAGR in the next five years (China even predicted its domestic CAGR at 32%). The operating model of major carmakers in the next ten years has to go thru the second transformation after the trend of BEVs as autonomous driving technology integrated with sharing concept.

With high urbanization and dense population, Taiwan is the ideal location to realize mobility services. In accordance with the development process of self-driving technologies, in my opinion, the time frame for the transportation model described in this paper is likely to occur in Taiwan between the years 2030 and 2035. Should this era-defining technology begin to materialize in its ideal scenario, changes in the concept of car use would overwhelm the automotive industry and reshape the urban landscape.

"Sharing" and "owning" are at opposite ends of the scale called consumer values. Traditionally, people would seek the life goal of owning a house and a car, yet younger demographics have shifted such objective to owning a car as priority given the skyrocketing price of real estate; nevertheless, the ones who are advocating “ownership” of a car might change their mind toward “sharing” in another 10 to 20 years as awareness of energy conservation, environmental protection, and carbon footprint reduction become rooted in people’s mind. How fast would the change be? This may be the most unpredictable aspect in the four major trends of automotive industry!