With the launch of its all-electric Chevrolet Bolt EV and progress in developing self-driving software, General Motors has grabbed the pole position in the race to develop automated driving systems, according to a new report. Analysts from Navigant Research rank the automaker ahead of 18 other companies vying to put automated cars on the road in a report released this week. GM has always been among the leaders in the pursuit of autonomous cars, the report says, but it has “begun to edge ahead” as commercial deployments draw nearer.
Signs of GM’s increasing readiness have appeared recently. Last week, the company sent government regulators a voluntary safety report that offered fresh details on its technology, and followed that report with a request that federal officials grant an exemption to existing safety standards that would allow GM to test autonomous cars that don’t have steering wheels starting in 2019.
Combined with the all-electric Bolt EV—the flagship of GM’s current autonomous plans—the company’s Cruise Automation subsidiary, investments in ride-hailing service Lyft, and in-house development of the Maven car-sharing platform all point toward providing General Motors with the technological savvy and capability to deploy at scale necessary to succeed in the nascent autonomous-vehicle marketplace,” according to Navigant’s report, co-authored by analysts Sam Abuelsamid and Lisa Jerram.
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“You have seen a handful take that leadership role. And that comes with risk, because you’re investing a lot of money.”
– Brandon Mason, PwC
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“With its strong profitability and finances from its traditional business, GM is well positioned to have a successful early deployment of highly automated driving in the coming years,” they write.
Behind General Motors, the report ranks Waymo, the Daimler/Bosch collaboration, and Ford as the autonomous front-runners. The report, an annual undertaking, placed Ford atop the leaderboard in March 2017, but it’s careful to note that the rejiggering of the board isn’t necessarily because of anything the company has done wrong during a year in which it switched CEOs and emphasized a city-centric approach as a cornerstone of its autonomous strategy.
“Ford’s move from first to fourth is more a reflection of the progress made by GM, Waymo, and Daimler than anything Ford has done wrong,” the analysts wrote. “Management changes at Ford have reinforced the company’s commitment to being a mobility service provider. This shift in the leaderboard shows the highly dynamic nature of this market, with players able to make major moves forward with the right tie-ups and investments.”
Aside from the horse-race aspect of this report, one of the other key takeaways underscores this point. Not only has there been a rejiggering at the top at Ford, but more broadly, there has been an influx of competition at the front of the pack. Last year’s report placed four companies in the “leaders” group; this year, Volkswagen Group, Aptiv, the BMW/Intel/Fiat Chrysler Automobiles collaboration, and the Renault-Nissan Alliance have joined them.
Another key point: The business models of the 19 companies examined can be highly varied, ranging from a company like Waymo, which is building fully driverless systems, to Volkswagen, which is leaning more on Level 3 systems that might keep human drivers involved in the driving operations, to Navya, a French company building microbuses that, in their first iterations, will run at low speeds along defined routes.
Beyond the “leaders” group, Navigant sorts the remaining companies into “contenders” and “challengers.” That is in line with an industry-wide view that there are three general groups of companies involved in autonomous developments—those that are leading, those that are following, and those taking a wait-and-see approach. Brandon Mason, an analyst at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), said it’s easy to identify where each manufacturer and major supplier stands.
“Some have made fundamental decisions that say, ‘We want to be a mobility company in the future; we don’t just want to be an automotive company,’ so you have seen a handful take that leadership role,” Mason said. “That comes with risk, because you’re investing a lot of money, and if you go down the wrong path first, you pay the price.”
Navigant’s study assigned a score to each company’s strategy and execution after examining go-to-market strategy, partners, production strategies, technology and sales, marketing, and distribution capacity, among other factors.
In the second tier of companies chasing automated driving systems, Navigant lumped in Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota, Volvo’s collaboration with Autoliv, Zenuity and Ericsson, and another involving Baidu and BAIC.
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“Tesla is the outlier, with big plans and lots of public announcements but technology that is at best dubious.”
– Navigant Research report
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In some ways, Volvo has been a market leader in accepting responsibility for any crashes caused by its automated driving systems, but the company recently scaled back plans to place 100 automated vehicles into the hands of regular drivers to see how non-engineers used them in certain geofenced environments near the company’s Gothenburg, Sweden, headquarters. The cars are instead equipped with Level 2 automated features, and Volvo is using interior cameras and sensors to study the interaction between drivers and these systems.
On its face, one of the biggest surprises of the Navigant report was that Tesla ranked dead last among the 19 companies profiled. Last year it was 12th out of 18 companies, which brought some consternation from some of the company’s fawning enthusiasts. This year, the Navigant analysts didn’t mince words in airing their concerns.
“Tesla is the outlier, with big plans and lots of public announcements but technology that is at best dubious and some serious financial and manufacturing quality issues to mitigate,” the report stated. “While Elon Musk gets a tremendous amount of media attention whenever he makes a product announcement or tweets about his company, the reality is that the Level 2 Autopilot system on current products has stagnated and in many respects regressed since it was first launched in late 2015.”
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