Toronto, Ontario -- The autonomous driving sector growing at about the same pace as the smartphone market did in the years after the release of the iPhone.
According to a new report from Astute Analytica, it will grow from US$170.22 billion in 2024 to US$668.64 billion in 2033. That equates to annual growth of about 17.63 percent, or about the same rate the smartphone market expanded between 2007 and 2016.
Two factors driving the advance of autonomous vehicles are the rate of technological improvements and cost decreases.
On the technology frontier, things are moving quickly. In 2025, Tesla’s full self-driving beta V12 is managing more than 10 billion parameters on the road, while, in 2020, its most advanced autonomous tech tracked between about two billion and three billion.
Chip maker NVIDIA’s new DRIVE Thor platform processes a mind-bending 2,000 trillion operations per second. This allows for predicting pedestrian movement across 12 city blocks.
As quickly as vehicles are advancing, the cost of making them is also falling. During the same period, Waymo slashed its sensor costs in half while improving the ranges and conditions in which these sensors operate.
One factor likely to drive further growth is the miniturization of existing sensors. Currently, OEMs are struggling to include the bulky equipment needed for safe autonomous operation on smaller cars.
As a result, the cost of autonomous technology in SUVs, which accounted for about 34.20 percent market share in 2024, is less than in smaller vehicles. Electric vehicles are also more likely to be autonomous than other cars, accounting for 45.36 percent of the autonomous market.
