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I think you're underestimating the difficulty of getting a system in tens of thousands of vehicles cheaply and easily. Do you really think with this many players, that anyone is going to get a huge market? They're not. Uber, even if they manage to survive their lawsuit and build a working system, has plenty of fast followers in the self-driving systems market. So the competition will be at most 24 months behind. Not nearly enough time to acquire and retrofit a fleet of vehicles, and then deploy the fleet in numbers big enough to make a difference to their current cost structure. (Keep in mind the fleet acquisition is a capital expenditure.) Second, they won't have a large market to distribute this technology, because they don't make cars, and the people that do make cars are already players in this space. I find it hard to believe that Volkswagon, Toyota, or General Motors would simply ditch their internal projects and license with a newcomer that has no manufacturing experience to be a supplier, especially when they themselves would be close to making their own solution which would be able able to be manufactured at scale. Look, everyone knows that auto manufacturer navigation and entertainment systems suck, yet they still roll their own instead of wide partnering with Apple, Microsoft, Google. My Acura's infotainment system is awkward, slow, and outright user antagonistic, yet there it is. At most, Uber's self driving kits could be what Alpine is to car stereos. Sure people buy them, but most don't, and if you already have one that works, you probably won't swap it out. |