You May Be Able to Own a Self-Driving Car After All

For years, automakers have told a specific story about how self-driving cars would arrive in the world. They would be shared and electric, fleets of ride-hail vehicles shuttling passengers like fancy taxis. General Motors and Lyft signed an agreement to pull it off back in 2016; Ford promised its robotaxis would debut by last year; Daimler said it would work with Uber to deploy fleets of Mercedes-Benzes. The logic was financial: Autonomous vehicle technology would be so expensive to develop that carmakers wouldn’t be able to offer it to most drivers at prices they could afford.

This vision carried profound implications: If city dwellers could depend on fleets of shared robotaxis for long trips, they could abandon the personal car altogether. Then the vestiges of car culture—the gas stations, the parking lots, the garages, the street parking—might disappear too. Who knew what sorts of parks, homes, and bike lanes might spring up in their wake?

Now, almost a decade into the self-driving experiment, the future looks more complicated. Progress on AVs has slowed, as both automakers and tech companies have missed self-imposed deadlines for autonomy. That has the companies looking for other ways to make money off self-driving tech. Meanwhile, cameras and sensors like lidar have gotten cheaper. The result: Some players are shifting, subtly, to a new business strategy—selling automated features directly to consumers.

At a (virtual) Wednesday keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the carmaker would “aim to deliver our first personal autonomous vehicles as soon as the middle of this decade.” The announcement lacked specific details, but Barra stressed that this personal robocar project is separate from the shared fleet of robo-taxis being developed by GM’s Cruise subsidiary. Cruise has said it plans to launch a commercial service in San Francisco this year. “In pursuing multiple paths simultaneously, GM and Cruise are gathering significant technological expertise and experience,” Barra said.

Again, the logic is financial, but the reasoning has changed. “The easiest way to actually make money from autonomy is to offer it as a feature for the consumer market,” says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst with Gartner. As with many automotive tech developments, he points out, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has led the way; the carmaker now charges $10,000 for its Autopilot driver-assistance feature, and it plans to raise the price to $12,000 later this month. The Tesla technology cannot drive a car by itself, but Musk has repeatedly promised that Teslas equipped with the add-on will one day be able to do so. By contrast, making money on robocabs “is definitely a job for patient automakers or tech companies,” says Ramsey—“one filled with a lot of operational challenges and costs.” To wit, Musk promised in 2019 to have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020.

GM is not the only automaker thinking differently about autonomy. Also on Wednesday, Intel-owned autonomous vehicle developer Mobileye said it would work with the Chinese carmaker Geely to sell an electric vehicle with advanced automated features by 2024. And Volvo this week said it will sell an advanced automated feature called Ride Pilot as a subscription-based add-on to a new electric SUV that will debut later this year. Ride Pilot is enabled by cheaper and lighter lidar from the company Luminar.