Business platforms for automated driving systems: a product-service system approach for mobility as a service

Abstract

The growing number of vehicles in the world has been causing cities to suffer from severe problems derived from traffic. With estimates of 66% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, mobility is becoming a key factor affecting citizens’ well-being and quality of life. Linked to the popularization of the service economy, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are a potentially disruptive change to the current business model of urban transportation, promising to change the future of mobility affecting not only the transport modes but society as a whole.Given this context, this study aimed to propose and discuss business platforms’ scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles under the perspective of a Product-Service System within distinct urban mobility contexts. Starting from a constructivist ontology, the research presents qualitative, descriptive, exploratory and predictive nature, being carried out through data collection in secondary sources - academic and gray literature - and primary sources - via in-depth interviews, focus groups and questionnaires with researchers and professionals in urban mobility in Brazil, France, Belgium and the United States. The results indicate that the arrival of the AVs in the market will occur in a more disruptive way with vehicles being offered as services instead of products, it is also concluded that the reasons for using a car will be reconfigured with different weights for the instrumental, symbolic and affective motives. The main typologies of use for AVs will be divided among Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer and Peer-to-Peer offers for both passenger and cargo transportation, such as: ride-hailing, ride-sharing, car-pooling, microtransit and last mile transport. These business models are configured as multi-sided business platforms, which may or may not be subsidized by the platform provider and may offer mobility services from point A to B via uni-modal or multimodal solutions, thus, four future scenarios were created in order to extrapolate real current mobility examples to a context where VAs are configured as a transport mode. At last, we tried to understand what would be the best governance structure to guide the transactions in each of the scenarios, based on tangible specific assets (transport modes) and intangible assets (data). We conclude that for the scenarios where the platform owns the fleet (scenarios A and C), governance structures tend to be more hierarchical, thereby reducing transaction costs but increasing operational costs.On the other hand, for scenarios B and D where there are no subsidies, governance tends to be more hybrid, with lower operating costs and higher transaction costs. In short, in big data contexts, more complex structures of mobility platforms tend to create the need for more sophisticated governance structures (with smart contracts via blockchain) and a more dynamic behavior of the stakeholders involved.