The Garages of The Future


Estimated read time: 4 minutes.

We’ve talked about pretty much all three at this point so now it is time to talk about them together and about how they might affect garages and garage doors in the future. It’s been said and it is being talked about a lot in the tech industry as well as the automotive industry that these three factors may collide to create a perfect storm of growth. Self driving cars, car sharing apps and electric cars are thought to all converge in the near future to become very important to one another and so the consumer. It’s all pretty interesting and exciting to think about and so we are going to look at what that might mean for the average person. What does all of this mean for the average homeowner with two cars in their two car garage? In this article we’ll go through that a bit and look at how all three could affect the average person who drives themselves to work every day along with their spouse who also drives to work. We will also quickly explain of course the relationship between these there factors in order to make things easier to understand in general.

The average electric car is somewhat out of the realm of the average person. They have large upfront costs and really only make sense for those that are driving contained to one area and then they have lower maintenance and fuel costs making them viable. Car sharing apps like Uber and Lyft have a large amount of overhead tied up in paying drivers because they are also in a way paying the drivers to rent the cars while they are working. Self-driving cars again will most likely have high upfront costs making them too expensive to be worthwhile for all but the rich early adopters. However, these high upfront costs would be balanced out by the low maintenance, low fuel and no driver costs for a company like Uber or Lyft. What this means is that these companies are very interested in purchasing large numbers of these electric self driving cars as soon as possible in order to lower costs in the long run. In essence this is the whole convergence, this lower cost in the end will mean that they can charge less and profit more driving more people to their services. Then this of course means they can buy more electric self driving cars which broadens their service and we have the same thing occuring.

Self driving cars are most likely not going to affect the average driver too much at first. People will definitely be distrustful of the cars and most people won’t be buying them. This on top of the cost means that after the launch of these most people will still have their daily commutes in their cars relatively unaffected. They may see a self driving car or two but they are still going to know that they need two cars in their garage for both of them to get to work.

Electric cars in many ways have already made their way into the mainstream. They are somewhat expensive still, but they are in some people’s garages and people are generally happy with them if they are the type of person who chose to buy an electric car this early. A few garages may have charging stations built in to them at this point but otherwise very few changes have been made. More garages will continue to prioritize electric cars as they become more popular but to begin with the adoption will most likely be fairly slow.

The car sharing apps are really the ones that bring it all together. With electric cars and self driving cars they will be able to make cars more available for cheaper to anyone with a phone. This means that a lot of people may find themselves doing the mental math between how much it all cost to go to the bank in their car or calling a car to drive them there and back. Once this happens is when the average person will truly be affected. It may take a while for these apps to bring the self driving cars online and it may take a while for people to trust them to bring them to and from their destinations without the help of a real person, but these things will be done in time and then more cars will be sitting in garages unused and some real changes will start to occur in enough time. People will start to see that their cars are costing them more money than they are worth and may even become an inconvenience. This will be when most people will save their cars for trips and special journeys, maybe selling one car and just keeping their favorite or largest car for family trips.

We may still be a few years off from this, but once all three of these factors come into play we are going to see the number of single car families grow I believe. Families will no longer need to pay for two cars and should have more freedom of mobility for less money. Their garages will be more open which means that they can be used for all sorts of new things. The garage is one of the most flexible rooms in your home so it is most likely that the garage may even out last the two car family in terms of usefulness. Whatever happens the garage can be used for a number of things with little to no extra cost. A home gym, home office, storage facility and many more ideas are just a trip to walmart or ikea away and will improve your life maybe even as much as self driving cars and their ability to take you wherever you need to go for barely any money.

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