[rubidium]

Uber actually transports people.

Ford actually builds cars.

Google... likes letting smart people do smart things.

While Ford may be the underdog in the race, I like its chances. It has the operational experience to take a "works-in-concept" to "works-in-reality". The software part, while difficult, is not the hardest part of "TaaS". The systems part is.

[oillio]

I agree the systems part is the hard part. The software to monitor and control thousands to millions of automated cars.

Ford has a large learning curve in order to figure out how to do that. It will take a very different workforce to build and manage a software system of that scale.

Google and Uber have been managing a system like that from the beginning, it is in their DNA.

I could see Ford providing the hardware, while a different company deploys and manages the customer facing operation. Demoting Ford to a vendor doesn't sound like such a good thing for Ford though.

[Fricken]

The race also includes GM, Tesla, Faraday Future (underestimated, but extremely well financed), Zoox- a stealth unicorn and Apple, among others.

While we'll see autonomous taxis operating in some capacity soon, they have to work extremely well and be profitable to justify an aggressive rollout, and that's likely more than a decade out. It's anybody's guess as to what the playing field will look like then.

Many analysts and speculators are getting ahead of themselves by conveniently ignoring just how much of the technical problems of autonomous vehicles need to be solved before these vehicles are ready to venture beyond very carefully managed services operating only in optimal conditions.