Mapping the Autonomous Vehicle Ecosystem
At the Frankfurt Motor Show in 2017 Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joked that “we’re the only company in Silicon Valley that’s not building an autonomous car”. A review of the global Autonomous Vehicle (AV) shows this to be virtually true.
Every major technology and automobile company in the world is either directly developing their own autonomous vehicle, invested in an autonomous vehicle startup or very actively partnering and positioning themselves in the space. The following picture highlights some of the key investments, partnerships and JV’s in the ecosystem (although still only scrapes the surface of the entire ecosystem)!
As you can see, the vast majority of companies in the AV ecosystem are actively partnering and forming consortiums across the entire stack; cloud — semiconductors — lidar/radar — software — manufacturer. Others are looking to own the entire stack.
For example, earlier this year Tesla launched their own FSD (Full Self Driving) Chip — pulling away from their long-term partner Nvidia. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are all also heavily down the path of building their own semiconductors and processors to power their respective ambitions in what will be a decade of vast acceleration in artificial intelligence. Further, the recent trade tensions between China and the US have further catalysed Chinese…
