Tesla and rivals like Waymo and GM are locked in a battle over the future of self-driving cars

Tesla and rivals like Waymo and GM are locked in a battle over the future of self-driving cars

The widening gap between Tesla and the rest of the self-driving-vehicle industry has created two distinct visions for the future of the technology.

• In recent years, many of the companies developing self-driving cars have backed off from the aggressive timelines they had previously set to introduce fully driverless vehicles for personal or commercial use.
• And they are increasingly using investments and partnerships with competitors to share the immense research-and-development costs driverless cars require, as did General Motors with its investment in Cruise Automation.
• But Tesla has bucked both of those trends, saying that fully driverless cars will be available in 2020, powered by technology the electric-car maker has largely developed in-house.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk's prediction that self-driving cars are imminent has been met with skepticism from experts and the electric-car maker has a history of making counterintuitive bets.
• Some have paid off, some have not.

In recent years, the autonomous-vehicle industry has confronted a reality check. The promise of cars that can drive anywhere under a variety of conditions without human supervision has shifted from a near-term goal to the distant endpoint of a long, incremental process.

Additionally, the companies developing self-driving technology are increasingly using investments and partnerships with competitors and legacy carmakers to share the immense research-and-development costs that driverless cars require.

"We're not in an automation revolution. We're in an evolution of automation," said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Read more : https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/tesla-rivals-waymo-locked-in-battle-over-self-driving-cars-2019-12