[twobitshifter]

If someone can get full self driving and patents it, they’ll have the market. Software is where we are seeing most innovation right now. Self parking, 3D surround cameras, accident avoidance, auto lane change, etc.

I think you’re correct that there will be less appeal from a technical performance perspective to buy an individual brand. All EVs have fast enough acceleration (some dangerously so.) So competition there is not going to continue. The new monstrous Hummer from GM has 0-60 times that rival super cars from a few years back.

There’s still some room for competition on handling, but eventually the skateboards will all have very similar suspensions.

So I believe we’re left with aesthetics, material choices, secondary features, and brand appeal. Are your vegan leather air conditioned seats hand stitched? Are your steerable headlights auto dimming with infrared vision?

[Gustomaximus]

I think you can break it down to:

1) Price

2) Reliability

3) Self driving

The first 2 are already standard.

Self driving will be a mix of capability and safety record. The latter being more important I suspect. There will be endless websites reviewing which one is the safest. And when you choose a robot to let you drive that is going to be a massive part of the equation. Even if accidents are extremely rare across all platforms, social media will make accidents feel far more common than they are + they will likely be for stupid 'human avoidable' error. This will drive fear, one of the most powerful marketing tools out there.

[asdff]

I fully expect self driving to be regulated to the point where it's more or less adaptive cruise control. At which point it will be as ho hum on the feature list as cruise control today. Because lets be honest, this is mission critical software being written by bleary eyed, sleep deprived kids fresh out of school, ultimately, and these companies would prefer to keep it this way in order to "move fast and break things" and maximize profit. In this case, I'd rather not be the one broken. Someone else can beta test your for profit software and be the unfortunate name in the next tragic newspaper article.

As self driving becomes commonplace we will see deaths go up both actual, and the coverage around deaths as you note. Building safer software that receives input from a chaotic, random, ever changing, heterogeneous world is a much harder problem than a lawmaker stepping up to regulate self driving and becoming the public hero of the story in the process. Personally, I also think there are more important problems for these engineering minds to be working on.

[petercooper]

All EVs have fast enough acceleration (some dangerously so.) So competition there is not going to continue.

I'm less sure about that. I think it will remain a distinctive feature that people will actively choose for or against, at least.

The new Mini EV from BMW (and which is replacing the i3 as BMW's 'flagship' EV) has only 0-60 in 7s which is not very interesting at all. But they're not aiming at the performance crowd (plus it can only do about 150 miles on a charge). Meanwhile Tesla can boast sub 5s 0-60 in almost every vehicle so anyone who wants that "slammed into the seat"/"first away from the lights" experience will still lean towards them.

A sub 5s 0-60 will be a selling point for me when it's time to go electric. If I must go electric, I want some dopamine-inducing benefit for it, and beating the remaining petrol cars off the lights will be a big selling point for me even if I'm buying a 7 seater SUV or whatever ;-)

[bdamm]

Your point is true, except that you will go electric, whether you do it for dopamine hit or not. The technology is strongly pointing to the complete and utter obsolescence of gasoline in a matter of only a few more years. Arguably gasoline is already obsolete and riding the very long tail of awareness of transition. Gasoline is still dominating in the cheapest sectors (of American auto sales, not true in China), but as cheaper electric models arrive and the used market continues to swell with good used electrics, that sector too will fall, and gasoline will be relegated to the old and the unusual.

So if you want to be beating people off the line, you better get into electric now, because the roads are filling up with 'em and quick!

[fomine3]

Do you seriously think is 0-60 matter for average buyer? Charging equipment at home should be the primary concern that should be solved.

[Answerawake]

From what I understand(I could be mistaken) BMW reused the i3 drivetrain in the Mini. While its impressive that they squeezed it into a smaller car, it shows their lack of seriousness that they reused 2013-ish technology in their newest EV. Given this, is it any surprise that the range, acceleration and other metrics are lacking compared to what else is on the market?

[turtlebits]

My father has a 2015 i3, and it's more than fast enough off the line- my Bolt is the same way even though they are both 6+ sec 0-60. EVs have instant torque and in fact are a bit scary to me as both the i3 and Bolt have small wheels.

[DennisP]

Some people think 6+ is "more than fast enough" and others want the thrill of 3.5 seconds. There are enough people in the second group to keep manufacturers making cars for them.

[chefkoch]

Most people won't fork over an extra 10k for a 2s faster 0 - 60 i guess.

[petercooper]

I don't have the numbers to hand, but when marques like BMW and Mercedes offer higher trim levels with bigger engines and more performance, they seem to sell better than you'd expect given how much you're paying for a slight performance boost.

[bin_bash]

Will a company be able to claim a carte blanche patent over self-driving?

[bluGill]

Maybe, but probably not. Most auto manufactures are doing a partnership. So you might see the Ford self driving car that locks out GM, but Ford is already known to be working with VW on self driving cars: in this case Ford and VW would both have self driving cars at about the same time using that patent. Ford and VW both have interest in a number of other companies as well that we can expect to be brought into this partnership quickly.

Cross licensing is fairly common in cases like this as well. Every car company has enough R&D as to produce some interesting patents. Want our more comfortable seats in your luxury car - give us good terms for your patent and we will give you good terms.

It isn't unheard of for companies to automatically freely license safety related patents. (someone who doesn't die in a competitors car might buy your car next time) So there is another option that might happen.

The above assumes there actually is a breakthrough that is patentable. If all we need is a large enough machine learning data set - those are easy enough to create (just very tedious), and so there are not patents to take out. If your system depends on some sensor - there are lots of different ways to make a sensor and work around the patent.

The idea of self driving has been around for long enough that you can't patent it. There is plenty of prior work to cite. Companies have been known to be working on it long enough that any idea patents would have expired before now.