Why the World’s Largest Automakers Should be Terrified of Google
There will be a massive market for self-driving vehicles for both commercial and consumer use. For the average car owner, the experience might be a little like this:
After your daily commute to work in your all-electric Tesla SUV, you'll stop at the front door of your office and hit a button that activates the self-driving mode for your car. As you walk into your office building, your car will slowly drive itself off for a day of Uber-ing to earn a bit of income instead of simply being a parked expense. Around 4:30PM, your car will drive itself back to your office and find a nearby parking spot. You'll drive home, taking full advantage of the exhilaration you get from the off-the-line torque of your super car.
You might think from this scenario, that the car companies should be most wary of Tesla, Uber or even Apple for that matter, but the real hidden danger for them is another tech giant: Google.
With several hundred self-driving vehicles now on the road in California, the self-driving future is imminent. With this disruption, Federal agencies in the US and abroad will be responsible for ensuring that these new technologies don’t put other drivers and pedestrians in danger. In the US, this means that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) will be responsible for crash and safety testing, as well as establishing regulations specific to self-driving vehicles. Their effort will go something like this:
In early 2017, all manufacturers will be requested to provide self-driving vehicles for an intensive 1 month test conducted by the NHTSA. With limited input from the manufacturers, the NHTSA will put the cars through paces including new scenarios in which human drivers are rarely dangerous, but computers homicidal. During the course of these tests, crash-test pedestrians will be injured and even killed. Self-driving cars will drive into inanimate objects, and the level of chaos will make for comedic visuals, if not for the tragic potential. Once of the dust has settled, The Google vehicle will have injured and killed significantly less pedestrians and vehicle occupants than any of the other cars. On that day, the NHTSA will set the Google performance metric as the floor for self-driving vehicle safety — leaving incumbent auto manufacturers in a lurch: Do we finally license Google software for our vehicles, or do we immediately invest hundreds of millions of dollars more to get our AI systems up to par?
To understand why Google will have such an advantage in this market it’s important to understand how a handful of factors will define safety in the self-driving era.
- Google has built the most powerful computing and big data infrastructure the world has ever seen
- Google operates a ‘Manhattan Project’ for Artificial Intelligence and deep learning, manned by the world’s most prominent experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil among many others.
- Google has been collecting massive amounts of vehicle and driver data via Android, Waze and various other mobile apps
- Google was an early-mover in the self-driving vehicle space, and regardless of their lack of aesthetic sense, knows more about real-world performance than the big guys have yet considered.
When you put all these factors together, you see that Google is the hidden giant in the future transportation market, the only one with the data, algorithms and expertise to build safest-in-market systems, and one that every major auto manufacturer needs to account for in their strategic planning.
