One billion people get in and out of a car every single day. They go to work, they go home, they shop, they play, they do a billion different things. Knowing where they're going and what they're doing can be very valuable. And then it can be sold to anyone.
It will be a sad day if and when real innovation loses to the sale of personal information for the purpose of surveillance and advertising.
Funny that an article that claims the Silicon Valley lost uses a quote by Elon Musk to argue its point. And using some of the Apple rumors as another indicator. I would not declare the race for the autonomous car over, until there exists one street legal autonomous car. And currently, Tesla is at least among the possible candidates for this achievement.
Of all the car companies (including Tesla), General Motors is the only one that appears to really have it's shit together, though this is liable to change.
I agree that the OEM's in general have done a better job of responding to the threat from the valley than the valley has done of adapting to the challenge of manufacturing things made of atoms.
But the race. It hasn't even begun. We aren't even clear about what the starting positions are.
Having a look at the history of autonomous cars [1] may be illustrative, the summary reads as follows.
Experiments have been conducted on automating cars since at least the 1920s; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987.
Autonomous cars are far from a new idea and companies and institutions spend serious amounts of time and money on this. The technology did not make it into production because it was not quite good enough, to expensive or the required computing power took up to much room. But if you started looking into the subject in the late 2000s or even later, then you are certainly late to the party and established car manufacturers and suppliers might have quite a head start for you to catch up.
Teslas "autonomous" tech is pretty much on par with the tech used by the classic OEMs. The difference is mainly in (sometimes misleading) marketing and the fact that Tesla is willing to accept higher risks. This might be good in terms of "pushing the envelope" but it can bite you badly if your immature systems are responsible for a growing number of accidents.
Last year in the U.S. market alone Chevrolet collected 4,220 terabytes of data from customer's cars. McKinsey forecasts that this could grow into a $450 to 750 billion market by 2030
Is there any data these big companies will not collect?
Except they did not. US == technology, innovation, risk, success / failure.
Europe == traditional engineering, lack of innovation, fear.
For the sake of argument the automakers are incapable of making an infotainment that would not suck. I do not quiet understand how can people think that traditional automakers while good at making cars, logistics and selling would better and more competitive in TECHNOLOGY than people from Silicon Valley.
Also SV is not trying to make money and compete with automakers at this point. They are in it to win in the long run.
Tesla is technically from Silicon Valley. And it's the leader of the pack on this.
I think Apple under Steve Jobs would've pulled it off as well, especially if Steve decided to go "thermonuclear war" on Musk for "stealing" his employees. But with Tim Cook the chances were much smaller. Tim Cook still hasn't started moving Macs to ARM, and Steve Jobs would've probably done it like 2 years ago. Windows is actually going to do that first, even though it's significantly harder for Microsoft to pull it off than it is for Apple. Microsoft tends to support legacy stuff a lot longer, and it has a lot more to support.
I'm surprised at how little attention Tesla has given to the idea of robotaxis. At the time they decided getting Mobileye's chips into every Tesla would be a good idea they should have started a dedicated L4 development program, with the big spinning lidars and everything else.
The idea of taking an incremental approach has been abandoned by every serious player except Tesla. Musk is more interested in sizzle than steak. Selling cars and keeping investors excited near term seems a bigger priority than being ready for the day L4 becomes a real thing.
Properly validating a fully autonomous car isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Tesla is acting like a hare, but I'm betting on the tortoises.
Tesla has robotaxis clearly in mind with their technology. They made several statements about a possible taxi like service based on their cars. They think they can achieve complete autonomy with their current tech package. They also hinted that your tesla could drive itself to service appointments. I don't know whether they actually manage to pull this off, but they clearly intend to.
Having the car drive itself away is in my mind one of the most important features to get increase 100% electric market. You can have the car drive to a charger and automatically drive back once full, mitigating a shortage of charging stations as people leave their cars there long after they are charged 100%.
It will be a sad day if and when real innovation loses to the sale of personal information for the purpose of surveillance and advertising.