A team of researchers has put a little more thought into a topic I’ve been curious about for a while: what will be the environmental impact of self-driving cars?
The projection is that an self-driving cars will increase energy consumption by 5% to 60%, as people increase automotive usage.
It’s worth noting that this is an increase in energy used, which is correlated with environmental impact, but the fuel used to provide the energy matters greatly. Gasoline is a relatively unfriendly fuel for the environment, whereas electric cars charged by wind power are very environmentally friendly. In between, it gets a little fuzzy, although studies indicate that driving an electric vehicle powered by coal-fired plants is probably worse than a gas-powered car.
Of course these studies rely on significant assumptions about how people will behave in a future autonomous vehicle world, and we’ll have to see how those assumptions play out in practice.
One line of thought is that autonomous vehicles may be more problematic in Europe, where train-travel is currently common and might decrease, as compared to the US, where autonomous vehicles will mostly be a substitute for human-driven vehicles.
One of the key suppliers for autonomous vehicle manufacturers is the Israeli company Mobileye. Mobileye specializes in computer vision and produces the chips and software to help cars “see” the road.
The company has had to deal with significant bad press for the last six months, including the rumor that Tesla was looking to drop them and move to another supplier. Tesla later denied that rumor.
According to Tech Republic, here are the big takeaways:
1. Already known for its partnership with Tesla, Mobileye has signed up its third major automaker, Nissan, to add to existing partnerships with GM and VW.
2. Automakers are outsourcing the creation of vision-assistance tech instead of doing it themselves.
3. By teaming up with automakers, Mobileye is gathering information from cars on the road, which can allow it to “crowdsource” maps. This access to data gives it an edge over tech companies like Google, who have not yet announced partnerships with car companies.
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has expanded beyond strictly mobile technology, and has become something of a CES, Part II.
In that vein, Ford CEO Mark Fields announced at the conference that Ford will be tripling its investment in autonomous driving engineering staff, over the next five years.
“When the first Ford autonomous vehicle comes out, it will be an autonomous vehicle designed to serve millions of customers — not just for those who buy luxury vehicles,” Fields stated.
That’s pretty clearly aimed at Tesla.
To date, Ford has been the mainline auto manufacturer most dedicated to self-driving cars, with its MCity project and its University of Michigan partnerships.
With Toyota and Volvo and GM all stepping up their efforts, though, Ford is finally getting some competition. And thankfully they’re embracing the challenge.
Elon Musk has finally gotten his hands on the Tesla.com domain name that has been owned by a Silicon Valley engineer and virtually unused for 24 years.
That literally appears to be almost all that’s known about the story, but Bloomberg has a little more.
Google’s self-driving cars are developed within X, the department colloquially known as “Google’s Moonshot Factory”.
Astro Teller is the head of X (his name was Eric until he changed it to something that suited him more).
Recently, in Backchannel, Teller describes the secret of X as trying to solve huge problems and then killing the solutions (and entire projects!) that don’t work.
It’s a great meditation on the Silicon Valley “fail faster” ethos.
So reports Crain’s Detroit Business, although I have seen this rumor in other places, previously. Among other public evidence, Google is hiring a project manager in Ann Arbor.
It’s hard to say whether this is because Google is considering ramping up manufacturing, or because existing and potential partners are all there, or because of the local automotive talent pool. But it makes sense, and it will be interesting to see how much of X’s self-driving car project shifts to Michigan.
This issue must have come up many times already — cars have had complex computer systems for years, if not decades — but I’m actually not sure what the answer is. Nor am I certain what the implications are.
The answer for computers and phones is (I think) that end-users purchase a software license (typically bundled into the purchase price of the device), but they don’t actually own the software.
Unless that model is for some reason unworkable in the automotive world, it seems reasonable enough to stick with that.
The 7NEWS story implies that the ownership issue has a bearing on how extensively end-users can modify their software, and indeed such an issue arose with Apple iPhones.
It will be interesting to learn more about the implications of this, especially since independent auto repair shops are a much larger economic force than independent computer repair shops.
In business school we did a case on eBay that was teed up perfectly for the professors to disabuse students of a cherished notion.
The central question was what makes eBay such a successful marketplace? And the intuitive answer is “network effects”. The more people are using eBay, the more the next user wants to join eBay, instead of a competitor.
And the professors loved this answer because it is so easy to pop a hole in it.
Buyers don’t want to be with other buyers — the competition just drives up prices. And sellers don’t want to be with other sellers — the competition just drives down prices.
Instead, the professors argued, it was eBay’s reputation metrics that really drove its success. Buyers and sellers want to transact with counterparties that have solid reputations, and only eBay can provide that.
This is a good and correct answer, but it’s always seemed incomplete to me. eBay has a couple of other strengths:
eBay has a thick market. There is no other market where you can find the Danish Christmas ornament from exactly 28 years ago that you just shattered and need to replace.
eBay has an incredible brand.
The point about branding is especially easy to ignore, in business school and elsewhere, because it is so close to magic. How do you build a good brand? How do you know if you have one? How do you know if one brand is stronger than another brand? How do you quantify when a brand is strong enough to support a monopoly?
Warren Buffett was a famously late in life convert to the power of branding, in all its mystery.
Which brings us to ride-sharing and Uber.
Uber, like eBay, has power in its reputation metrics, in the thickness of its market, and in its brand.
So how do these stack up to eBay?
Uber’s reputation metrics are less important than eBay’s. Uber’s ride-sharing flow is simpler than eBay’s asynchronous process of buying, and paying, and shipping, and receiving, so counterparty reputation matters less.
Uber’s market thickness is more important than eBay’s. If an Uber driver or rider can’t find a match at any given moment, they’re much more likely to give up on the service altogether, than if an eBay buyer or seller can’t find a match.
Uber’s brand is as important as eBay’s. But Uber hasn’t locked up the market yet. Lyft is on their heels. The question is, unlike with online auctions, is there room for two players?
One last note is that while eBay does not have a direct competitor, Craigslist serves as an alternative, albeit a distinct one.
Lyft is much more of a direct competitor to Uber than Craigslist is to eBay, but the existence of Craigslist raises the possibility that two firms could survive in the market.
David Silver 