Blink and you might miss the moment automated vehicles go mainstream. At some point in 2017, a fully autonomous Tesla will blast across the country en route from Los Angeles to New York. The person sitting in the front left seat — let’s no longer call her the driver — will be free to watch a movie, drink a latte, or wave to locals as she zips past. If Elon Musk has his way, the tech will then roll out to drivers in 2018…
In the eight months since I wrote Cars and the Future, there has been an explosion in news about the future of transportation, much of it in the last few weeks:
- Ford announced plans for its own car-sharing service built around self-driving Fords
- Elon Musk penned a second master plan envisioning a future car-sharing service built around self-driving Teslas
- Nutonomy launched a trial in Singapore of its own ride-sharing service built around Renault and Mitsubishi vehicles modified to be self-driving
- Uber announced its own self-driving trial in Pittsburgh in partnership with Volvo. Uber alsoacquired self-driving startup Otto, founded by former members of Google’s self-driving team
- And, speaking of Google, Alphabet executive David Drummond stepped down from Uber’s board a day before the company announced an expansion of its Waze-based ride-sharing service from Israel to Uber’s home city of San Francisco
- …
Source: Google, Uber, and the Evolution of Transportation-as-a-Service – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Driverless cars have moved with remarkable speed from DARPA-funded fantasy to picking up passengers on the streets of Pittsburgh. The excitement is justified, in part, because there’s much to gain. A single, shared autonomous vehicle could replace roughly 11 privately-owned vehicles, according to a recent University of Texas study. By reducing the number of cars on the road, self-driving vehicles could cut traffic, emissions, and urban sprawl, while improving safety and saving money for the millions of households that would no longer have to own a vehicle.
Yet we’re still a long way from adopting a futuristic fleet of driverless vehicles, and the main obstacle is navigation. Manufacturers teach their cars to move by employing fleets of drivers who travel the streets in ordinary cars, scanning for changes in previously mapped roads…
Source: Driverless Cars Need Just One Thing: Futuristic Roads
Tesla Motors says the Autopilot system for its Model S sedan “relieves drivers of the most tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel.” The second part of that promise was put in doubt by the fatal crash of a Model S earlier this year, when its Autopilot system failed to recognize a tractor-trailer turning in front of the vehicle. Tesla says the driver, Joshua Brown, also failed to notice the trailer in time to prevent a collision. The result? In Tesla’s own words, “the brake was not applied”—and the car plowed under the trailer at full speed, killing Brown…
Source: What NASA Could Teach Tesla about Autopilot’s Limits – Scientific American
I remember when I first fell in love with cars. It started small with Hot Wheels when I was three and Micromachines when I was six. Everything about them was fast and exciting — even the commercials were narrated by the World’s Fastest Talker. I loved them.
Then, when I turned 12, my dad and I began taking annual trips to see the real thing at the New York International Auto Show. I looked forward to going every year, because even at that young age, I felt a connection to cars and the freedom they represented…
One of the key characteristics of complex systems, such as the world’s energy and transport sectors, is that when they change it tends not to be a linear process. They flip from one state to another in a way strongly analogous to a phase change in material science. We have written about this before, for instance here and here.A second important characteristic of this type of economic phase change is that when one major sector flips, the results rip through the whole economy and can have impacts on the societal scale…
“Self-driving cars will push down prices for ride-sharing to insanely low levels.”
“When that happens, ride/car-sharing becomes more the norm, at least in urban areas. (Will buying a car one day be like buying a tractor?) Which means traveling in a car becomes more like traveling in an airplane or a bus — an on-demand experience that separates riders from manufacturers and their brands. In that world, the brands that matter most are the ones that sell you your tickets, operate the cars, and tell you how soon they will arrive.”
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Source: Why GM + Lyft Is About the End of Car Brands | Andy Raskin | LinkedIn
Looking at the wave of disruption that is already happening right now or coming to industries that have not natively been part of the digital business, the automotive industry is surely one of the most interesting. Their products are what moves the world and what captures many people’s passion and materialistic desires. Even with the core use case being a physical one, transportation of people and/or goods, this industry will be disrupted, just like any other industry and way of doing business has been or will be disrupted by exponentially advancing digital technology (e.g. traditional retail, the media/newspaper industry, the music industry, books publishers and stores, travel agents, even the telco/communications players, etc.).
We are now in an era in which technologies such as computing, networks, sensors, artificial intelligence and robotics, to name a few, are advancing exponentially. Continue reading “On the Future of the Automotive Industry: tough Times ahead for the Incumbent Automakers (André Cramer)”
ANDRÉ CRAMER 