Benedict Evans has published a typically well-researched and detailed look at the potential for electric and autonomous cars to reshape aspects of our lives. And all the threads converge in an interesting place:

Pulling all of these threads together: if parking goes away, road capacity increases by, perhaps, several times, and an on-demand ride is the cost of a coffee, then one needs to start thinking much more generally, not just about cars, trucks and roads but cities, land use and real-estate. In fact, one needs to think about cities. Cars have remade cities over the past century, and if cars are now going to change entirely, cities will change too.

Or, to put it more directly:

I still think autonomous cars will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. Just as cars did.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) August 29, 2016

It really is an essential read if you want to think out the long-term consequences of two technologies working in parallel. And it’s more evidence that we need to start planning for the long-term, to make the most of what’s coming.

Image by Steve Jurvetson, and used under a Creative Commons licence