If you’re going to conduct business and eat meals while commuting, you’re likely to start asking yourself why you’re even bothering to commute at all. This is an odd paradox that auto manufacturers will have to deal with over time. As the technology pushes them closer and closer to fully self-driving cars, they’re going to find that more and more people simply don’t have a need to travel by car very much at all.
So far telecommuting has only been successful in a select number of industries. Only a fraction of the workforce has this option. Will this change? Who knows?
I predict that people will travel more and not less as self-driving vehicles become viable. People have many reasons to be mobile. They may want to meet up with other people with similar views, values, and interests who do not necessarily live close by. They may want to see sights. Or take vacations.
Look how the automobile has transformed the travel habits from two-hundred years ago. Now the average person can travel in ways that only the rich or powerful could in the past.