When Will Autonomous Vehicles Be Used Within MaaS?

October 2023

Mobility-as-a-Service

Matthew Purnell

Senior Research Analyst

MaaS, or Mobility-as-a-Service, enables travellers – whether day trippers, commuters, or executive travellers - to plan, book, and pay for journeys through a single digital channel.
 
MaaS is a shift away from the use of privately owned modes of transport services towards, as the name suggests, mobility provided as a service. It is achieved through the combination of public transport, private transport, and micromobility to allow consumers to get from one location to a destination; and made possible through the payment of a service on an ad hoc or subscription basis, with the tickets consolidating multiple forms of transport is multimodal journeys are made.

Autonomous Vehicles & MaaS

 
In our latest research, we define seven key technologies that are crucial to the future of MaaS, including autonomous vehicles.
 
Autonomous vehicles have the ability to accelerate the potential of MaaS by encouraging more people to shift away from private vehicle use if they provide a cost-efficient alternative to owning personal vehicles. Furthermore, autonomous vehicles have the potential for ride-sharing and ride-hailing fleets to offer a cost efficient alternative to their current offerings.

Necessary Changes to Infrastructure

 
Before autonomous vehicles are used for MaaS purposes, they need to be more widely used in general.
 
While both are seen in some areas, the overall utility of the technology remains significantly low, thus slowing down the maturity within the market. Furthermore, legislation regarding autonomous vehicles is in place across many countries that either limits or prevents autonomous vehicles from being as effective as they could theoretically be.
 
For example, Germany has a strategy in place for autonomous vehicles at the national level, which need to be expanded for country-wide success. The majority of AVs can only be operated on public roads if they are level 1 or 2. Level 1 being driver-assisted automation and level 2 being partial driving automation, which vehicles can control steering and accelerating. However, a human sits in the driver’s seat and can take control at any time.

Incentivising Adoption

 
Given how novel autonomous vehicles are, incentivising consumers to adopt, or even try the transport type is likely not going to be the main problem.
 
However, due to the high cost of development, deployment, and maintenance, many companies could be dissuaded from even considering autonomous vehicles into their fleets. Many investors will likely incur losses, but could come with the benefit of gaining popularity. MaaS could facilitate incentivisation through consolidation of the offering within a single platform or as an additional mode of transport consumers could take, thus encouraging transport operators or fleets to adopt the technology.

Deployments to Date

 
The deployment of autonomous vehicles has been slow, and this is even more poignant for deployments in the context of MaaS.
 
However, a recent MaaS autonomous vehicle deployment comes from May Mobility deploying its autonomous fleet of cars to work in concert with Moovit and its MaaS app in April 2023; allowing the use of these vehicles in addition to other modes of transportation.
 
Another big name to autonomous vehicles in 2023 is Amazon-owned Zoox. Whilst not a MaaS-integrated offering, Zoox have deployed autonomous ‘robotaxis’ in the cities of Foster City in California and Las Vegas in Nevada.

Barriers to Implementation

 
Autonomous vehicles being such a fresh innovation in the grand scheme of not only MaaS, but in general, means there are a plethora of barriers preventing their full implementation.
 
Primarily, legislation surrounding autonomous vehicles vary across not only countries, but even states and municipalities, and thus the deployment of such fleets will vary. Furthermore, how they will properly be incorporated into MaaS solutions can vary, and whether this will be regulated remains to be seen.
 
Another barrier for autonomous vehicles includes the financial cost of the vehicles, with initial set-up costs being significant. This will deter many operators from properly investing in the innovation unless long-term benefits are evident, which is still too early to gauge as of 2023.