The Autonomous Race to Market

Humanity has always looked toward the future with certain hopes and aspirations. We assume that new technologies will fit seamlessly into our existing lives. But rarely do these expectations meet reality; case and point: the push for autonomous cars. Back in the days of The Jetsons, everyone just assumed that cars would be flying by the 21st century. There wasn’t even a question about whether or not we would be flying them. Everyone simply assumed that our technologies would be so advanced by this point that we would be chauffeured through the sky. But what most of us failed to take into account is how a free market effects technological development.

We are 16 years into the 21st century and we still don’t have flying cars, in fact we barely have self-driving cars. There are a lot of factors in play, but I’m going to focus this post on the effect that a free market has on technological development, specifically in the auto manufacturing industry. Tesla was the first disruptor to the otherwise homogenous auto industry. They took a model that had been around since the turn of the 20th century, and flipped it on his head by throwing conventional car wisdom out the window. They decided you could make a car that was better on the environment and your eyes by electrifying the process. Tesla incorporated new technologies that other car manufacturers simply weren’t equipped to. They utilized a business model based on different industry disruptors all combined into one. And it worked perfectly for Tesla.

But if you begin to succeed as the only company operating in a free market you can bet that you won’t be the only one for long. The competition will begin to crop up all around you. Your novel solution will begin to suffocate under all the noise surrounding it. After, Tesla’s successful dive into the market, all of the other big auto manufacturers began to take note. Adjusting company goals for the future, and changing projections based on where the market was now headed.

Soon after Tesla bared their chest to the world, the tech giants in Silicon Valley began to recognize the value in this market. Google and Apple both began developing autonomous machines, and while they both claim to have done so for differing reasons. It’s obvious that both Google and Apple saw this as too lucrative of an opportunity not to be involved in. After Google and Apple dove into the icy autonomous waters, we saw ride sharing startups recognize the imminent threat that these companies were presenting to them. Both Uber and Lyft began to develop autonomous fleets of cars with the understanding that if they didn’t adapt to these changes they would be thrown down in the footnotes of tech companies that were around during the beginning of this century, but failed to adapt to a changing market.

But these behemoths aren’t the only companies who have joined in on the soirée. There are more than 3o corporations working on autonomous technologies. And I can guarantee that number will grow exponentially as we begin to recognize all of the added benefits that autonomous vehicles can create. But you may be wondering how is this affected by a free market?

The first effect will be on the time it takes the product to get to market. Because there are going to be so many players operating on the field, these manufacturers are going to be racing to get their product on the market first. But with that added pressure certain sacrifices will undoubtedly be made. Certain features will be neglected, or relegated to the next update, forcing a less thought out product into the world.

There is also going to be quite a bit of differentiation among how the technologies work, and what kind of automobiles they work on. Certain companies will focus on providing an adaptable framework that can turn a normal automobile into an autonomous one. While others will focus on a line of product that feature an autonomous element. There are an unknown number of directions that autonomous technology could head in, with an unknown number of iterations we could see. Which is both a benefit and a detriment of a free market. Ultimately, we will have to wait and see which side the coin lands on, but hopefully the coin learns to just fly itself instead.