Mubasher: Rival carmakers all around the world are competing to develop brand new electric driverless cars and trucks that can be controlled by smartphones.

Last month, analysts at Bank of America Merill Lynch expected fully electric cars to make up 12% of the global market by 2025 and 34% by 2030, warning that the automakers which fail to adapt to the shift might not survive.

Industry giants have already started creating autonomous vehicles, aiming to make them affordable and able to adapt to new technologies.

German automaker Daimler collaborated with Bosch to develop self-driving electric cars, which could be produced by 2020, while its competitor Volkswagen announced a plan to spend EUR 34 billion ($39.89 billion) over the next five years on hybrid and electric vehicles.

"The speed" of the shift toward an electric future "will have to be taken on by all automotive companies," France’s PSA chief executive Carlos Tavares said at the Frankfurt auto show held in September.

German consulting firm Roland Berger expected demand for private vehicles to decline 30% by 2030, predicting Robo-taxis to represent 40% of the industry’s profit by this time.

European automakers fear they would not be able to catch up with their Asian rivals with China heading the race in producing electric motors and batteries. This has led the European Union (EU) commission to urge companies to join a large-scale battery production cycle.

"This technology is too important to import it from overseas" Maros Sefcovic, the commission’s vice president in charge of energy, noted.