Carmakers Play Numbers Game in $53 Billion Self-Driving Splurge

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In BloombergNEF’s latest road transport outlook report, we see autonomous vehicles accounting for roughly 8% of the kilometers that passenger vehicles travel by 2040.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty in the pace of technological development in this industry, so it’s easy to find predictions that this number will be far higher or lower. But this much is certain: charting the share of kilometers driven by self-driving vehicles in the future involves drawing a line going up and to the right.

The general belief in this trend ...