Driving themselves past the Tipping Point
CNN Tech: 2016: A tipping point for excitement in self-driving cars
Self-driving or autonomous cars are no longer a shining light on the distant horizon. They’re very much here. The article describes major corporate and government-related deals and events related to self-driving cars in 2016 and comments on the accelerated pace and significance of the same.
It is interesting to consider the model of companies and even governments investing self-driving car projects as a market with network effects. An autonomous vehicle project requires a sizable investment, which say in the late 2000’s, may have exceeded the reservation prices of most corporate entities that may have been interested in investing. However Google, with its massive investment capital were able to afford setting up a self-driving unit (known today as Waymo) in 2009. With each investment like this, self-driving cars came closer to being a reality, and the idea of investing in self-driving engineering projects became more and more lucrative. Before investing, each company considers how many other companies- perhaps its competitors- have invested in autonomous projects. With more and more of it market competitors investing, the company’s incentive not to be technologically outmatched drives up the price it is willing to pay. Thus investments in autonomous projects increase. According to the article, these investments and expectations may have passed the tipping point in 2016, with companies like Uber, Qualcomm, Tesla and Google pushing billions of dollars into self-driving projects.
With the tipping point behind us, claims by tech celebrities like Tesla’s Elon Musk- who expects to demonstrate full vehicular autonomy by the end of 2017- seem a lot more achievable.