Justin Fox, Columnist

Carmakers Need a New (Business) Model

The way cars are made and sold will change in a world of ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles.

May 25, 2016 at 5:57 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

You gotta start somewhere.
Photographer: Noah Berger/afp/getty images

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Toyota is investing in and planning to collaborate with Uber, the largest ride-hailing service. Volkswagen is investing $300 million in Tel Aviv-based Uber rival Gett. And that’s just Tuesday’s news. In January, General Motors put $500 million into Lyft, another Uber competitor. Earlier this month, Apple invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing company Didi and Fiat Chrysler made a deal with Alphabet to develop self-driving minivans.

After almost a century of making cars and selling them in more or less the same way, automakers (and others) are getting the sense that the business of automotive transportation might be about to change radically. Here’s Toyota executive Shigeki Tomoyama on the Uber deal: