A few million self driving cars and trucks should be on the road by 2022. Afterwards a few million per year will be added with self driving car conversion kits and new cars and trucks.

Tesla Motors and other companies will deploy millions of self driving cars.
This can lower the cost of car per trip mile by 5 times.

Self driving Uber, Lyft and other shared vehicles would be able to service the same number of riders with fewer vehicles.

The transformation to self driving will be more rapid than many forecast. Many forecast it will take until 2050 for the full impact to be felt.

Amazon is looking to revamp the global supply chain by reducing layers and getting much more efficiency in shipping, drone delivery and self driving vehicles.

Reducing supply chain barriers could increase global GDP and world trade much more than reducing all import tariffs, according to a 2013 report by the World Economic Forum.

Enabling Trade: Valuing Growth Opportunities finds that if all countries reduce supply chain barriers halfway to global best practice, global GDP could increase by 4.7% and world trade by 14.5%, far outweighing the benefits from the elimination of all import tariffs. In comparison, completely eliminating tariffs could increase global GDP by 0.7% and world trade by 10.1%. Even a less ambitious set of reforms that moves countries halfway to regional best practice could increase global GDP by 2.6% and world trade by 9.4%.

The World Economic Forum boost in global GDP was only from getting to half way the global best in 2013. The supply chain can be radically improved with self driving cars, trucks and drones.

Amazon already has super efficiency robotic warehouses.

Tesla plans to makes its factories ten times more productive every ten years by reinventing its robotic factories every two years.

Cargo Drone Motherships and drone swarm delivery

Single item delivery will not where the supply chain transformation ends.

Having cargo drone motherships that send drone delivery swarms will be more efficient. The small drones that make the end point delivery would not even need to be able to fly back to the drone mothership. They could be picked up by self driving trucks and cars.

Deliveries could be ordered online and delivered within 30 minutes. This would drastically reduce office and retail storage and inventory.

Lowering supply chain barriers is effective because it eliminates resource waste and reduces costs to trading firms and, by extension, lowers prices to consumers and businesses. Supply chain barriers can result from inefficient customs and administrative procedures, complex regulation and weaknesses in infrastructure services, among many others

This first stage of the robotic supply chain could boost Global GDP by 25-50%.

The second act in the 2030s would be transformation of cities to leverage the hyper-efficiencies of the robotic supply chain.

SOURCES – Amazon, Tesla, World Economic Forum, Columbia University

Brian Wang

Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.

Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.

A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.