We are at the peak of the autonomous driving hype cycle, and the trough of disillusionment is going to wipe out a few players, and see the massive consolidation of others. These start-ups are very capital intensive and once the funding environment shifts, it's going to be a big problem for a lot of them.
The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start.
There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet.
The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly).
Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C.
One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy.
This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.
Without revealing too much, German automakers have expertise primarily in logistics, with some expertise in automotive design.
There is a vast pyramid of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers that feed into that logistics chain. A lot of those suppliers are promising automakers that they can deliver either components that feed into autonomy, or else autonomy in full. This fragments the effort across literally hundreds of small teams, many of whom have little to no expertise at all in the necessary disciplines.
Additionally, every German automaker also has its own in-house autonomy team, and the relationships between in-house, contracting, and supplier teams is chaotic. Many managers see autonomy as another way to build a small empire and make a name for themselves, and it just results in a huge organizational snarl.
The fact that this is an area no one knows how to execute on yet since it's brand new, coupled with these gross inefficiencies, will mean autonomy efforts from the automakers will be stillborn. They will eventually learn from it though, acquire the right teams, and get on with putting it into their cars just as they're doing with EV.
You're mentioning startups that will be wiped out. The big players in this scene are companies like Google, GM, and Uber. Not startups by any stretch of the imagination.
There are many many startups working on some fraction of the autonomy stack (e.g. Aurora) or the entire vertical (e.g. Zoox). I call out several specific ones in my comment if you care to read it through.
The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start.
There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet.
The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly).
Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C.
One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy.
This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.