Self-driving vehicles, also known as autonomous or driverless vehicles, represent the future of transportation. These vehicles use a combination of sensors, cameras, radar, and artificial intelligence to navigate roads and make decisions without human assistance.
The self-driving vehicle industry has seen rapid growth and innovation in recent years. Major tech and automotive companies are investing billions into developing and perfecting this technology. McKinsey estimates that autonomous vehicles could make up as much as 15-20% of new car sales by 2030.
In this article, we will explore the 10 largest self-driving vehicle companies advancing this revolutionary technology. For each company, we will provide an overview, discuss their self-driving approach and technology, key partnerships, progress made, future plans, and valuation.
#1: Waymo
Waymo began as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009 and has emerged as the clear leader in autonomous driving technology. The company became an independent Alphabet subsidiary in 2016.
Technology: Waymo uses a combination of lidar, radar, cameras, and software. Their vehicles have a detailed 3D map of their operational area. Waymo‘s proprietary lidar sensors provide industry-leading object detection and distance capabilities.
Partnerships: Waymo has partnerships with automakers like Jaguar, Volvo, and Fiat Chrysler to integrate its self-driving system, known as the Waymo Driver, into vehicle models. They also partner with suppliers like Intel, Magna, and AutoNation.
Progress: Waymo has driven over 20 million miles on public roads. In 2020, they launched the first commercial driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona called Waymo One. Rides are available to hundreds of customers.
Future Plans: Waymo plans to expand its driverless taxi service to other US cities while continuing to refine its technology. The company aims to eventually license its Waymo Driver system to automakers globally.
Valuation: Over $30 billion
#2: Cruise
Cruise is developing autonomous vehicles focused on ridesharing in urban areas. The company was acquired by General Motors in 2016.
Technology: Cruise uses lidar, radar, cameras, and sensors feeding into AI-powered software. Their compute platform called Cruise Zeus will offer an industry-leading 1000 trillion operations per second.
Partnerships: Cruise partners with parent company GM to produce its purpose-built Cruise Origin electric shuttle vehicle. Other partners include Honda and Microsoft.
Progress: Cruise became the first to receive a driverless testing permit in California in 2020. They give employees fully driverless rides in San Francisco.
Future Plans: Cruise is planning to launch a commercial driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco starting in 2022. They are working closely with regulators toward this goal.
Valuation: $30 billion
#3: Tesla
Unlike most companies on this list focused solely on self-driving software, Tesla develops autonomous features integrated into its popular electric vehicles.
Technology: Tesla uses cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and powerful onboard computers running AI neural networks. Their system dubbed “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) continually learns from the fleet.
Partnerships: As an automaker and self-driving developer, Tesla does not have major partnerships with other companies. However, they do use Nvidia chips and Intel Atom processors.
Progress: Over 100,000 Tesla drivers are testing the FSD beta system on public roads today under supervision. Capabilities include automatic lane changes, traffic light stops, and parking retrieval.
Future Plans: Tesla aims to enable fully autonomous driving without human supervision as early as 2023. They are working closely with regulators as they continue expanding the FSD beta program.
Valuation: As a public company, Tesla is worth over $900 billion. The autonomy business specifically is harder to isolate but makes up a significant portion of Tesla‘s future value.
#4: Argo AI
Argo AI is an autonomous vehicle startup backed by major automotive companies Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen.
Technology: Argo‘s self-driving system, Argo Autopilot, uses lidar, radar, cameras, and high-precision maps combined with machine learning. Their lidar system called Argo Lidar is claimed to have the industry‘s longest range and high resolution.
Partnerships: In addition to backing from Ford and Volkswagen, Argo partners with companies like Lyft, Walmart, and Arrival.
Progress: Argo is testing self-driving vehicles in six major US cities. They are the first to test autonomous vehicles in Austin, Miami, Palo Alto, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington DC without safety drivers.
Future Plans: Argo plans to launch commercial driverless delivery services with partners in 2022 and driverless ride-hailing in 2023. Volkswagen and Ford plan to sell autonomous vehicles using Argo‘s system starting in 2025 and 2026 respectively.
Valuation: $7.5 billion
#5: Aurora
Founded by former leaders of the Google, Tesla, and Uber self-driving projects, Aurora develops full-stack hardware, software, and data services for autonomous driving.
Technology: Aurora uses cameras, radar, and both long- and short-range lidars for 360-degree perception. Machine learning models interpret the data to enable self-driving capabilities.
Partnerships: Major partners include Toyota, Volvo, FedEx, Uber, and PACCAR. Aurora also acquired Uber‘s self-driving unit in 2020.
Progress: Aurora is testing its trucks, SUVs, and cars in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Texas, and Arizona. Testing includes higher speed operations on highways and surface roads.
Future Plans: Aurora plans to first launch commercial driverless trucking in late 2023 then follow with passenger vehicles in 2024 leveraging partnerships with top automakers.
Valuation: $10 billion
Baidu, Pony.ai, Motional, and More Contenders
Several other major companies are playing important roles in the autonomous vehicle space globally:
Baidu: Chinese tech giant Baidu has over 240 autonomous driving patents. They have provided over 1 million public robotaxi trips in Beijing and plan to produce over 100,000 autonomous vehicles annually by 2024.
Pony.ai: With operations across China and North America, Pony.ai stands out for its safe driving record spanning over 2 million real-world autonomous miles. They are aiming for large-scale commercialization starting in 2023.
Motional: A $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv focused on perfecting autonomous driving software and integrating it into various vehicle types for robotaxi services planned to launch in 2023.
Amazon Zoox: Acquired by Amazon in 2020, Zoox is developing zero-emissions robotaxis designed specifically for autonomous use from the ground up rather than retrofitting existing car models.
Mobileye: Recently filed for a 2022 IPO valuing the company at nearly $50 billion, Mobileye provides self-driving technology focused on vision-based sensors and mapping to automakers globally. Ford, Nissan, Audi, and BMW leverage Mobileye’s tech.
Comparing Approaches of the Major Players
While the top companies share the goal of developing safe and reliable fully autonomous vehicles, they differ significantly in terms of technology, commercialization strategy, partnerships, vehicle types targeted, geographic focus, and more.
For sensor technology, Waymo, Argo AI, Cruise, and Pony.ai lean heavily on lidar while Tesla notably eschews lidar entirely at this stage, using cameras and radar instead alongside AI software. Aurora and Motional leverage both lidar and cameras extensively.
Cruise and Waymo are focused specifically on software to enable robotaxi ridesharing services without directing resources into designing or manufacturing vehicles themselves. In contrast, Tesla, Volkswagen, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, and other automakers aim to sell autonomous-enabled consumer and commercial vehicles leveraging partnerships providing self-driving software and hardware.
Geographically, most companies highlighted have focused initial rollout in North America, with some like Baidu primarily targeting China for now. Europe is another key market certain to see expanded testing and deployment by virtually all major players over the next decade.
Determining an ideal go-to-market strategy balancing speed, cost, safety, and scale has been a pivotal strategic debate. Waymo has taken a very methodical zone-by-zone approach to mapping geo areas then carefully layering in autonomous features before expanding. Others are more aggressive about accelerating real-world testing before productization.
Key Challenges Facing the Autonomous Driving Industry
Fully self-driving vehicles reaching consumers still faces monumental challenges:
Technology Improvement: Most experts believe today’s autonomous vehicles remain unreliable navigating adverse weather, complex intersections, emergency vehicles, and unpredictable human drivers. Expanding operational design domains will require better perception algorithms and sensors.
Regulation and Legal Concerns: Laws, licensing protocols, and liability implications for driverless vehicles are still being defined by policymakers globally. Unclear regulations combined with some high-profile accidents have created resistance.
Validation and Trust: Gaining consumer confidence after the initial novelty wears off will require accumulating millions more miles than what most systems have achieved today. Autonomous shuttles serving low speeds and simple routes will arrive first.
Cost: With today’s hardware costing upwards of $100,000 per vehicle including lidars, compute stacks, and sensor suites, self-driving fleets cannot yet compete with human-driven ridesharing, taxis, and trucking on cost at scale.
The Future of Self-Driving Vehicles
When accounting for the remaining technology and adoption risks, we will see increasing yet targeted autonomous vehicle deployment over the next decade before potential ubiquity by 2040 and beyond.
In coming years, most companies will focus on commercializing low-speed robotaxis and autonomous delivery in geo-fenced areas rather than selling to mainstream consumers. Driverless trucks hauling freight on interstates could arrive within the next five years.
McKinsey predicts autonomous vehicles will make up just 5-15% of passenger miles and 10-15% of commercial miles by 2030 – impressive but far from ubiquitous. We will one day get to full autonomy but the transition timeline depends heavily on resolving both behavioral and technical trust issues through stepped deployment.
Leading self-driving players today will enable increasingly advanced pilot projects using safety operators over the next 2-3 years. Then, once proving reliable autonomy with human oversight removed by 2025 and beyond, permanent commercial robotaxi and freight services can thrive at scale.
Conclusion
Pioneering companies like Waymo, Cruise, Tesla, Argo AI, and Aurora are racing to make self-driving vehicles an everyday reality. Tremendous progress has been made developing advanced hardware, software, mapping, machine learning, simulation, and other key enabling technologies.
However, substantial roadblocks around technology improvement, regulation, consumer trust, and costs remain before autonomous cars and trucks operate freely across wide geographies without restrictions. We will see gradual adoption in controlled settings over the next decade focused on commercial use cases.
Autonomy promises societal benefits like enhanced safety, increased access and affordability of mobility, productivity gains, and sustainability improvements over human-controlled vehicles. Realizing this future has become more a question of when, not if. The largest players today aim to make the 2020s the decade autonomous transportation finally arrives at scale.
