The Race To Domestic Autonomous Vehicles

When will we be handing over the wheel to robots?
This Christmas I loaded up a car with luggage and presents for relatives and hopped in the front seat, bound for my holiday destination. I didn’t touch the steering wheel even once, but instead was able to focus on corralling a 10-week old puppy on the drive down. I arrived a few hours later and casually strolled out of the vehicle without ever once having taken the wheel.
OK, so I’m leaving out the fact that I wasn’t travelling alone: someone else did the driving! But self-driving cars are about to make the shift from the dream world into the real world, so my anecdote could very soon become a reality. With estimates of their arrival at five years or less, these vehicles could be hitting the road by the time we reach 2020. Who will be at the front of the race to domestic driverless vehicles?
Elon Musk’s company, Tesla, is a major contestant in the race for autonomous vehicles. Tesla has been working on driverless cars for some time now, and the CEO recently stated that he believes they will appear on roads in “a few years”. This is a slightly more vague estimate from his September 2015 projection when he told Borsen, a Danish news site, that he expected the cars within three years, although it is believed that his being vague is hinting toward a shorter timeline. In fact, Musk’s estimates are getting shorter each time he speaks about the vehicles; in 2014 his estimate was “five to six years”.
Tesla is not the only player the autonomous vehicle game. Google started working on their own version back in 2009 and they have not been shy about their accomplishments: on their Self-Driving Car Project website, they say: “We’ve self-driven over 1 million miles and are currently out on the streets of Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas”. The company has not been as bold as Tesla in releasing projected release dates, but its brazen test drives suggest that it can’t be too far down the road (pun intended).
Although they have developed their own vehicle to test drive their self-driving system, Google is rumored to be looking for a major auto manufacturer with which to form a partnership. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2016, Google is expected to announce a partnership with automotive giant Ford. By joining with Ford, Google would be effectively providing the brains of the operation while Ford would provide its 100+ years of vehicle manufacturing experience in the form of automotive brawn.
This powerful partnership introduces an interesting cottage market, one in which technology and automotive companies join forces to outsource the part of the operation in which they may excel in order to produce a front-runner in the market. It is almost inevitable that Apple, which in typical fashion has kept their plans for a driverless car secret, will need to choose a partner to help them in the race to the driverless dream; they will be wont to choose a company that is equally as good at keeping secrets. Some large car companies have followed the Tesla model of speaking openly about their plans and proposed release dates, so they may not be the best choice for a covert company like Apple. Perhaps the better fit would be startup companies, or even the manufacturers that supply the parts to some of the automotive giants.
The number of major players in the car industry who have started to give their projected release dates is growing rapidly. Exact dates vary by source, but Nissan and Toyota recently said they will have an autonomous vehicle on the road by 2020, whereas Audi says it will need until 2025 for the rubber to meet the road. But without pairing with a major technology force like Google or Apple, will these companies be able to compete in the driverless vehicle market? Connected cars are on a much closer horizon, and smaller tech companies who are able to make a splash in connected vehicle systems may be able to capitalize on the autonomous vehicle marketplace, making an attractive package for large car companies. However, it will be necessary for them to create a competitive package to compete: according to a recent survey by 2016 Observatoire Cetelem, 55% of motorists would be willing to buy a self-driving Google or Apple car. With this many consumers ready to relax behind the wheel of one of these technology superpowers, strong partnerships that marry technology and the automotive industry are a must.
Speculate as one might, at this point it’s safe to say that autonomous vehicles will be on the consumer market before we know it. The question is who will drive the race to the top – or, rather, who won’t be driving in the race at all?