Updated: 42 Primers On Driverless Car Innovation And Disruption

“Baloney” and “nonsense” captured the zeitgeist of many reactions to my early articles on the potential of Google's self-driving car program. But, that was in 2013, when many viewed driverless cars as nothing more than a high-tech dalliance by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

How times have changed! Since then, Google’s self-driving car program has spun out into Waymo, an independent business unit valued at more than $100 billion (down from an earlier estimate of $175 billion). Waymo’s cars have driven more than 10 million miles autonomously on public roads and 10 billion miles in simulation mode using real world data.

While many technical, business, and market hurdles remain, Waymo’s efforts have sparked a global arms race to develop autonomous driving technology. As one auto industry executive told me:

None of us would be paying this kind of attention to autonomous driving if Google had not made the progress that it did, and scared us into believing that it might make even more.

A host of industry leaders, adjacency aspirants and new entrants in both the automotive and high technology ecosystems are now investing billions in a high-stakes race to enable (and dominate) a driverless car future.

General Motors, for example, has invested billions, taken on billions more in partner investments, and reshaped itself to refocus on AV (autonomous vehicles) and EV (electric vehicles) production. Ford, Toyota, Daimler, Tesla and also every other major carmaker and tier 1 supplier are forging ahead with their own driverless strategies—driven large part by startups founded by veterans of the Google effort such as Aurora Innovation, Argo AI and the controversial Otto llc.

Much has been learned over the last few years of intense development. Even as the sector continues on a roller-coaster-like ride of waxing and waning enthusiasm, the opportunity and challenge is the industrialization and commercialization of those learnings.

As I’ve written from the onset of this exploration, such commercialization threatens to throw trillions of dollars of economic value up for grabs in several industries, including automotive, energy, freight, insurance and real estate. Even more important for society, there could be huge potential effects on health, transportation, pollution, congestion and resource usage. More than one million deaths and 50 million injuries each year are due to vehicular accidents. In addition, energy and transportation contribute significantly to poor air quality and climate disruption. Autonomous vehicles could help improve—or exacerbate—these issues, depending on how the industrialization of the technology unfolds. 

To allow for a single pointer that helps to facilitate an ongoing discussion on these issues, I will keep this post updated with a complete reverse chronological listing of all my articles related to the business and societal innovation and disruption enabled by driverless cars. Happy reading. I'd welcome your comments.

1. Can Driverless Cars Gain Market Acceptance?
2. Can Driverless Cars Scale into Industrial-Strength Businesses?
3. 15 Hurdles to the Industrialization of Driverless Cars
4. 3 Ways the Trolley Problem Distracts from Solving the Bigger Human Driver Problem
5. What Did Uber's Autonomous Car Know, And When Did It Know it?
6. Driverless Cars: 90 Percent Done, 90 Percent Left To Go?
7. Waymo Built A Great Wall And Made Uber Pay For It
8. Driverless Bus Smart Enough to Anticipate Impending Accident But Too Dumb To Get Out Of The Way
9. Waymo's Human Problem
10. Chris Urmson Reflects On Challenges, No-Win Scenarios And Timing Of Driverless Cars
11. Three Questions Shape the Prospects of Alphabet's Waymo
12. Waymo Is Crushing The Field In Driverless Cars
13. Uber Is Positioned To Slingshot Ahead of Google In Driverless Cars
14. Singapore: The First Mover Nation for Driverless Cars
15. With Chrysler and Ford Deals, Google Continues to Think Big and Start Small On Driverless Cars
16. Is Tesla Racing Recklessly Towards Driverless Cars?
17. 7 Wonders of the Driverless Future
18. 7 Ways Driverless Cars Could Fail
19. Keep Your Eye On The Prize Offered By Driverless Cars
20. The Virtuous Cycle Between Driverless Cars, Electric Vehicles And Car-Sharing Services
21. 5 Reasons Why Automakers Should Fear Google’s Partnership With Ford
22. California Wrongly Slams the Brakes On Google’s Driverless Car
23. Google Is Millions Of Miles Ahead Of Apple In Driverless Cars
24. Will Nissan Follow In Kodak’s Footsteps By Rejecting Driverless Cars?
25. Trillions Will Depend On Whether Driverless Cars Require Human Drivers
26. The Economist Provides False Comfort to Established Carmakers on Driverless Cars
27. Driverless Taxis Will Spark Uber’s Kodak Moment
28. Who Wins and Who Loses in Google and Uber’s Breakup Over Driverless Taxis?
29. 5 Reasons Why Mary Barra Should Rally GM To Beat Google At Driverless Cars
30. 5 Reasons Why Automakers Should Fear Google’s Driverless Car
31. Driverless Taxis Might Replace Private Cars And Public Transit
32. Driverless Car Safety vs. Jobs — Inevitable or False Choice?
33. Will Driverless Cars Force A Choice Between Lives And Jobs?
34. Dispatch From 2023: Google Considers Buying 250,000 Driverless Cars From Tesla, But Buys Tesla Instead
35. Google Car + Uber = Killer App
36. Driverless Cars Are Just One of Many Looming Disruptions
37. Will Auto Insurers Survive Their Collision with Driverless Cars?
38. How Automakers Still Win
39. How Google Wins
40. Why Driverless Cars Will Come Sooner Than You Think
41. Driverless Car Ripple Effects—As Far As The Eye Can See
42. Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google’s Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions