Expert Analysis
TEAM 5
Research goals
Our team focused on interviewing and researching ‘experts’ opinions’ or pre-existing future visions of ride-sharing.
Research Goals:
Researching what experts are most relevant to ride-sharing.
Reaching out to them to schedule short interviews.
Asking open-ended questions to learn more about their opinions of the future of the ride-sharing industry.
Synthesizing the interview to gather multiple insights.
Key findings
Insights
The current ride-sharing business model is not sustainable.
Profit margins are inherently low in the taxi business.
Ride-sharing companies have been squeezing wages from drivers in preparation.
Utilizing idle sharing vehicles to create on-the-way services.
Idle sharing vehicles can be used for animals, FedEx, Parcel, and Pharmacy delivery.
Mobility as a service
It is possible to reimagine a future transportation system without vehicle ownership.
Opportunities
Opportunity areas:
How can we re-position the drivers and the oil industry - use other natural resources like solar, wind, etc to fuel our cars?
Self-regulation - Who’s responsible for a crash with 2 autonomous vehicles?
How to measure the car's reliability? People are not used to seeing a car driving without a driver.
Self-driving cannot be compared based on Mileage like fueled cars.
Remove humans - can drive longer distances - human needs to rest.
Hypothesis statements:
The future gig economy will be a one-stop shop - where the self-driving cars will be delivering a parcel and pharmacy delivery, grocery, food, and people?
The closest provider (Uber, Lyft, Via, or Cruise) to the service can reach out to pick customers.
An autonomous ambulance with an human attendant will be taking patients to the hospital.
We will trust autonomous cars more than human drivers.
We will enjoy sleeping while our cars will take us to different places :)
People will prefer to commute in the shared autonomous cars instead of owning a car.
Research Method
Industry experts were consulted via virtual interviews. We conducted surveys to get a pulse of the market currently.
We collected and analysed the data by affinity mapping and categorizing the open ended interview answers under broad groups. Synthesizing the information helped us understand the key opportunity areas and ultimately derive hypothesis statements from them.
Resources
Currently, we had interviewed 3 experts and had took note in google doc, feel free to check if you want to learn more about the details and process of these interviews.
Interview with David Bellona, Design Manager at Lyft (with Team2)
Interview with Patrick Mulvihill, Sales Executive at Kinetik KEY Opportunity
Interview with Effy Zhang, Staff Product Designer at Cruise
We also researched some second-hand expert interview report from other media:
Team
Kimaya
Shruti
Jinpei
Frank