Picture an ugly morning. Rain blowing sideways, wind howling. You sip your coffee, dreading the commute, and run through the checklist of the day ahead. Then comes the small dread underneath it all: did anyone fill up the car last night? How long has that low-fuel light been on?
Before long, that morning is going to look very different. I have ridden in the future of transportation, and it is glorious. It is something straight out of The Jetsons.
(For the younger readers: The Jetsons was a cartoon from my youth about a family living in the space age, complete with a flying car that folded into a briefcase and a robot maid named Rosie. And yes, cartoons were once drawn by hand, frame by frame, with no computers involved. Gasp.)
Last night a gold Tesla Cybercab glided silently to a stop in front of our house. As we walked up, its gull-wing doors swung open, and we stepped through enormous openings into seats that would not be out of place in business class. I went full tech nerd. Lisa looked around a bit nervously and asked where the mirrors were. There are none, I told her. There is also no steering wheel and no pedals. It is like sitting in the back of a limousine, except that where the privacy glass should be, there is a windshield and the open road.
Eighteen minutes later we rolled up to Ezov, the excellent Israeli-inspired Mediterranean spot on East Cesar Chavez. The doors of our little cocoon lifted like a butterfly spreading its wings, and we stepped out. It was peaceful. Serene. Those of you driving Teslas with Full Self-Driving have had a taste of this already. For everyone else, prepare to have your mind blown.
Our poor dinner companions suffered through my describing every detail. But what has stayed with me this morning is not the ride. It is the ramifications.
The commute, reimagined. Go back to that ugly morning. Instead of plotting a route around construction and checking the traffic, you have a chauffeur waiting patiently in your garage. The cabin is already 72 degrees, and your music, podcast or news is cued up. You are carried quietly to the office, the school or the doctor’s appointment while you answer email or finish the last chapter of your book. You are dropped exactly where you want to be, and the car goes off to find a place to wait. Like a happy golden retriever, it is there when you come out, eager to take you to the next destination.
Today the fare is about what you would pay for an Uber. But like the personal computer, the price of this technology only goes in one direction. I can see a day when it costs about what a bus ride does. This is not fantasy. It happened to me last night.
The ripple effects. I cannot yet get my mind fully around the economics, but a few questions keep me up at night.
Fuel. Here is the surprise: the professional fleet is not where the fuel is. By my rough math from published mileage studies, every taxi and ride-hail car in America together burns something on the order of a billion gallons of gasoline a year. Americans as a whole pump roughly 136 billion. The real prize is the family car, which sits parked about 95% of the time. If a meaningful share of households decides that a robotaxi on call beats a second or third car in the driveway, and those robotaxis are electric, gasoline demand doesn’t erode at the edges. It erodes at the core. Demand is already slipping as cars get more efficient. This would accelerate it.
Detroit (and Tokyo, and Stuttgart). If you sell cars one at a time to households, what happens when households need fewer of them, and your best customers become fleet operators who negotiate like airlines buying jets? I suspect the CEOs of the major automakers are not sleeping well.
Amtrak. Amtrak just had its best year ever, with 34.5 million trips in fiscal 2025. Much of the train’s appeal is that you can work instead of staring at the bumper ahead of you. A car that drives itself door to door, overnight if need be, competes for exactly that trip.
Lives. This is the one that moves me most. 36,640 Americans died on our roads in 2025, and that was a good year, down nearly 7%. Roughly 30% of traffic deaths involve an alcohol-impaired driver, and distracted driving kills someone every two and a half hours. Waymo, which runs driverless cars here in Austin and in four other cities, reports 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers over 270 million miles. Machines don’t drink, don’t text and don’t get drowsy. Even partial adoption means thousands of families spared the worst phone call of their lives.
Jobs. Then there is the hard side. About 2.2 million Americans drive heavy trucks for a living, another 1.5 million drive delivery trucks, and millions more drive for Uber, Lyft and the delivery apps. Many are self-employed, and many have few easy alternatives. This transition will be painful for them. We must think seriously, as a society and as neighbors, about how to help those displaced, as we must every time technology rewrites an industry.
No going back. What we cannot do is try to stop it with a Luddite knee-jerk. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
For investors, that is the point. Changes like this create enormous winners and quiet losers, and the second-order effects (parking garages, auto insurance, gas stations, commercial real estate, the power grid) often matter more than the headline. My job is to think through those ripples so your portfolio isn’t caught on the wrong side of them. I will have more to say on that in future missives.
In the meantime, if you are in Austin and want to see the future, open the app. It is a new morning, and the sun is already coming up. If you see a gold car tooling around Austin, give me a wave.
One last thing. While you are enjoying your own gold-car ride, think of me and KWM. There is a button on the screen that reads “Change Destination.” Perhaps that is a sign that you, or someone close to you, would benefit from a new way of reaching your financial destination. If so, I would welcome the call at (512) 368-4593, or an email at scott@keelwealth.com.
Scott Zodin, Keel Wealth Management
Statistics cited are from public sources believed reliable as of October 10, 2026, including NHTSA, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Amtrak and Waymo; the taxi and ride-hail fuel figure is the author’s estimate. Companies are mentioned for illustration only, and this is not a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security. Opinions are the author’s as of the date written and are subject to change. Keel Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment adviser; registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.
A New Morning
Picture an ugly morning. Rain blowing sideways, wind howling. You sip your coffee, dreading the commute, and run through the checklist of the day ahead. Then comes the small dread underneath it all: did anyone fill up the car last night? How long has that low-fuel light been on?
Before long, that morning is going to look very different. I have ridden in the future of transportation, and it is glorious. It is something straight out of The Jetsons.
(For the younger readers: The Jetsons was a cartoon from my youth about a family living in the space age, complete with a flying car that folded into a briefcase and a robot maid named Rosie. And yes, cartoons were once drawn by hand, frame by frame, with no computers involved. Gasp.)
Last night a gold Tesla Cybercab glided silently to a stop in front of our house. As we walked up, its gull-wing doors swung open, and we stepped through enormous openings into seats that would not be out of place in business class. I went full tech nerd. Lisa looked around a bit nervously and asked where the mirrors were. There are none, I told her. There is also no steering wheel and no pedals. It is like sitting in the back of a limousine, except that where the privacy glass should be, there is a windshield and the open road.
Eighteen minutes later we rolled up to Ezov, the excellent Israeli-inspired Mediterranean spot on East Cesar Chavez. The doors of our little cocoon lifted like a butterfly spreading its wings, and we stepped out. It was peaceful. Serene. Those of you driving Teslas with Full Self-Driving have had a taste of this already. For everyone else, prepare to have your mind blown.
Our poor dinner companions suffered through my describing every detail. But what has stayed with me this morning is not the ride. It is the ramifications.
The commute, reimagined. Go back to that ugly morning. Instead of plotting a route around construction and checking the traffic, you have a chauffeur waiting patiently in your garage. The cabin is already 72 degrees, and your music, podcast or news is cued up. You are carried quietly to the office, the school or the doctor’s appointment while you answer email or finish the last chapter of your book. You are dropped exactly where you want to be, and the car goes off to find a place to wait. Like a happy golden retriever, it is there when you come out, eager to take you to the next destination.
Today the fare is about what you would pay for an Uber. But like the personal computer, the price of this technology only goes in one direction. I can see a day when it costs about what a bus ride does. This is not fantasy. It happened to me last night.
The ripple effects. I cannot yet get my mind fully around the economics, but a few questions keep me up at night.
Fuel. Here is the surprise: the professional fleet is not where the fuel is. By my rough math from published mileage studies, every taxi and ride-hail car in America together burns something on the order of a billion gallons of gasoline a year. Americans as a whole pump roughly 136 billion. The real prize is the family car, which sits parked about 95% of the time. If a meaningful share of households decides that a robotaxi on call beats a second or third car in the driveway, and those robotaxis are electric, gasoline demand doesn’t erode at the edges. It erodes at the core. Demand is already slipping as cars get more efficient. This would accelerate it.
Detroit (and Tokyo, and Stuttgart). If you sell cars one at a time to households, what happens when households need fewer of them, and your best customers become fleet operators who negotiate like airlines buying jets? I suspect the CEOs of the major automakers are not sleeping well.
Amtrak. Amtrak just had its best year ever, with 34.5 million trips in fiscal 2025. Much of the train’s appeal is that you can work instead of staring at the bumper ahead of you. A car that drives itself door to door, overnight if need be, competes for exactly that trip.
Lives. This is the one that moves me most. 36,640 Americans died on our roads in 2025, and that was a good year, down nearly 7%. Roughly 30% of traffic deaths involve an alcohol-impaired driver, and distracted driving kills someone every two and a half hours. Waymo, which runs driverless cars here in Austin and in four other cities, reports 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers over 270 million miles. Machines don’t drink, don’t text and don’t get drowsy. Even partial adoption means thousands of families spared the worst phone call of their lives.
Jobs. Then there is the hard side. About 2.2 million Americans drive heavy trucks for a living, another 1.5 million drive delivery trucks, and millions more drive for Uber, Lyft and the delivery apps. Many are self-employed, and many have few easy alternatives. This transition will be painful for them. We must think seriously, as a society and as neighbors, about how to help those displaced, as we must every time technology rewrites an industry.
No going back. What we cannot do is try to stop it with a Luddite knee-jerk. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
For investors, that is the point. Changes like this create enormous winners and quiet losers, and the second-order effects (parking garages, auto insurance, gas stations, commercial real estate, the power grid) often matter more than the headline. My job is to think through those ripples so your portfolio isn’t caught on the wrong side of them. I will have more to say on that in future missives.
In the meantime, if you are in Austin and want to see the future, open the app. It is a new morning, and the sun is already coming up. If you see a gold car tooling around Austin, give me a wave.
One last thing. While you are enjoying your own gold-car ride, think of me and KWM. There is a button on the screen that reads “Change Destination.” Perhaps that is a sign that you, or someone close to you, would benefit from a new way of reaching your financial destination. If so, I would welcome the call at (512) 368-4593, or an email at scott@keelwealth.com.
Scott Zodin, Keel Wealth Management
Statistics cited are from public sources believed reliable as of October 10, 2026, including NHTSA, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Amtrak and Waymo; the taxi and ride-hail fuel figure is the author’s estimate. Companies are mentioned for illustration only, and this is not a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security. Opinions are the author’s as of the date written and are subject to change. Keel Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment adviser; registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.
What do you think?
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