Uber is an app-based transportation company. Google has invested in Uber using its capital arm Google Ventures. Google’s investment stood at $ 258 million in August, 2013. It is speculated that Google may even acquire Uber in future. Google has appointed a Director on Uber’s board. Uber’s dependence on Google goes beyond capital. Uber’s smart phone  applications for drivers and riders are based on Google Maps, that provides Google solid data about the transportation pattern within cities. Without this, Uber will be crippled. The alternatives such as MapQuest of AOL, Apple Maps and other regional versions are inferior. It was thought that Google and Uber are allies.

However, new developments have made Google a competitor of Uber. Google has been working on autonomous vehicles for quite some time. Its R & D is being carried out in Google X lab. Google expects the driverless cars to serve the neighbourhoods to pick up and drop passengers. Google car can be used as a shared vehicle. Google is deep-pocketed and technology-savvy competitor. To compete with Google, Uber will have to develop the driverless car technology itself or will have to tie up with a company that contributes such vehicles to its fleet.

In future, these could be autonomous taxis.In  other words, the automotive paradigm is changing.Instead of  making a car available for sale, now the car will be offered on service basis. It is going to be a different relationship with personal mobility. A car will not be for ownership, but for access. Cars will be available on per use basis, or as taxis for urban hops or for weekend trips.

Apple also proposes to introduce an iCar. The traditional auto manufacturing was large volume model but these driverless cars will be produced in low volumes. It will be seen that these vehicles operate at peak efficiency whereas the cars now carry less than their capacity and remain parked for a considerable period of time. Service model of car manufacturing will not be capital intensive.There will not be intensive distribution.Then as the cars will be electric there will not be complex manufacturing involved.The launch dates are targeted to 2020. Cars are going to be redefined as autonomous vehicles for service.

Actually what is at stake is the future of car itself. Auto companies and technology companies are both trying to shape the car of future. It is to be seen to which extent they are complementary, to which extent they are dependent, and to which extent they are competitors.The growing use of computing power in vehicles and the interface of the cars with other smart devices offer new opportunities to technology companies and auto makers, and make them rivals in the same space.

Apple’s market capitalisation of $750 billion is worth more than that of reputed auto makers put together.The size of Apple and Google itself intimidates them.

Self-driving cars are not crash-proof. This has been revealed in the disclosures mandated by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Even these accidents are not as ghastly as those with the traditional cars.And the driverless cars learn from the mishaps. They are involved in 11 minor accidents but none of these were due to a fault in technology. The accidents included being hit from behind by other cars or side-swiped. One problem is the unpredictable nature of the road traffic, unlike trains and planes where the traffic is predictable.

Google announced on 15th may, 2015 that its self-driven prototype cars are ready to leave the test track and hit the public roads in its home town Mount View, California. It is a step forward in its autonomous automobile programme. The bubble-shaped vehicle has been tested for the past one year.

While the vehicles will be on the road, a safety driver will be on board. The speed limit will be 40 km per hour. The safety driver aboard will have a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal and break. This will allow him/her to take over if needed.

It is to be seen how the community perceives the vehicle and interacts with it. It will let us know the challenges of a self-driven vehicle on the road.

Uber too is into the self-diving vehicle space.These cars have been spotted on public roads on Pittsburg, Prnsylvania, near its research centre at the Carnegie Mellon University, known as the Centre for Advanced Technologies (CAT).

Prototype self-driving cars that Google uses are usually equipped with a high-end laser sensor known as  Lidar, a conical device that sits on the car’s roof and spins like a windmill, detecting obstacles. Google says the Lidar costs as much as $ 85,000 each. Though costs are expected to come down, the devices are too expensive for today’s production cars.

Google has been testing self-driving prototypes since 2009, mainly around Silico Valley headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google and other automotive manufacturers expect self-driving cars to be ready by 2020. In June, 2015, the company began testing bubble-shaped self-driving prototype vehicles of its own designs on public roads around Mountain View.

Google has now begun testing its self-driving cars in Austin, Texas.(July, 2015). Google is sending a second specially equipped Lexus Rx450h prototype to Austin. It wants to gather information on how prototypes interact with traffic, road conditions and people.

Google does not want to build its own self-driving cars, but would prefer to find a development and production partner. Most major multinational automakers too are developing their own so-called automated vehicles. The major functions such as steering, brakes and throttle would be controlled without human effort.

At present, Google self-driving cars have humans on board who can assume manual control of the vehicles if necessary.

Researchers in the US have built a $10 million fake city which spans 32 acres and features dummy shops and restaurants to test driverless cars of the future. The University of Michigan has opened MCity, the world’s first controlled environment specifically designed city to test these technologies. In addition to evaluating automated or driverless cars, the researchers also hope to test out so-called connected vehicles which are cars that communicate with one another (vehicle-to-vehicle control :V2V) or with pieces of equipment such as traffic lights (vehicle-to-infrastructure control : ( V2I ).

Audi is developing a self-driving car running at the speed of 120 mph. In future, such cars will make driving safer, and free the driver of the monotonous task of driving. To begin with, Audi, Tesla, Cadillac will introduce cars which which can control themselves in a traffic jam. They take the cues from the aeroplane design, by loading the car with twin steering and braking systems and the computer can switch over to the other system if one system fails. There are front and rear facing cameras and a precise GPS system. Audi has the driver option, and is not introducing a completely autonomous car. Drivers supervise the automation and take control when needed. When auto function takes over, the steering wheel retracts and dashboard light glows green. When the driver needs to take control, the dashboard light glows red. The steering wheel appears back. As we have observed already, Google wants to develop a fully driverless car.

Connected Cars

Todays high-end cars already have 100 micro controllers which check automatically for safety and fuel economy. Modern cars have the computing power of 20 PCs. They have 100 million lines of programming code. They process 25 giga bytes of data an hour. (McKinsey Study).

Already 27 million vehicles worldwide are connected to the Internet. This number is expected to triple by 2022. In India, the basic connectivity is seen in only 1.4 per cent of cars. That is because of the price consciousness of Indians. Telematics in a connected car increases the costs by Rs. 5000 — Rs. 10000. Inftotainment and diagnostics increase the costs by Rs 25000 –Rs. 50000. Manufacturers have yet to put a tag on automotive driving.

Connectivity of cars will soon become an important buying condition for customers. There will be driver assistance systems. In India connectivity will grow to 2.5 per cent by 2020.

Internet on wheels consists of connected powertrain that has apps to diagnose performance and car’s health, smartphone connectivity to the dash board, vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity on highways, infotainment and voice control.

Imagine a driverless car at a cross road where it slows down to allow a pedestrian to cross over. It stops other cars which follow it and are human driven. They are likely to hit from behind. Such observance of law in letter is problematic. A car in test finds the human drivers inching forward at a square. The robot in the driverless car expects them to stop. Thus the robot gets paralysed. In the real world, human behavior is unpredictable — at times it does not comply with the rules. A driverless car is too safe. It has to learn to be aggressive in the right amount. Humans have the benefit of the eye contact. They gesture each other to decide the right of way. In a completely driverless world, there could be wrecks and deaths. Extensive use of such cars is many years away. Testers are still grappling with hypothetical threats such as hackers, and how to deal with a situation in which a car breaks down on a highway. There is a problem of blending robots and humans.

Software expertise has become a must for automobile and tech companies as the connected cars do need lines of code — the code connects the car motors to batteries, to smart phones, to activate brakes when sensors detect an obstruction ahead. Car makers must upgrade their digital expertise. There is cross-pollination between the tech and car sectors. The scale of digitalization is rising. There should be recruitment of manpower to address this. This is the biggest disruption for the automobile industry — connectivity and connected driving technologies.

Google’s autonomous car’s prototype was introduced in 2014, and is called self-driving toaster. Google’s vehicles will have no human controls beyond a  ‘go button’,  ‘a please slow down and stop’  button and a ‘ stop pretty quickly ‘ button. The passenger gets into the car and says into the microphone the destination, and the car does the entire journey. The final product is going to be dramatically lighter, more efficient and safer than anything on the road today. Google wants to cut down on vehicle related fatalities. The approach of the traditional automakers is evolutionary. They layer incremental technology on the top of the established automobile paradigm. Google is disruptive. Traditional automakers respond by rushing some semi-autonomous technology.

The buzzwords in auto industry so far were ‘torque’ and ‘horsepower’. After Apple and Google entering into this field to develop an autonomous car, the buzzword is ‘connectivity’. Cars in future are going to be safer and more efficient. Traditional automakers would find it difficult to duplicate the new rolling software platforms of Apple and Google. Software firms have huge resources to pour into the R&D. The traditional companies could get reduced to being mere hardware makers, and most profits would accrue to the software firms. Therefore, it is in the interest of the car makers to keep control of the software which goes inside vehicle. It is important for them that they have their own operating system. Right now, Apple designs its iPhone and iPads and Foxconn in China manufactures them. If car makers do not change, they too could be just the Foxconn of Apple.

Even if Apple and Google are not on the scene, there is tremendous pressure on car makers to change the way the cars are manufactured. Regulators want less polluting cars. The answer is to develop hybrid vehicles, and thereafter electric vehicles. Both the hybrid and all-electric cars do need more software than the traditional IC engine cars. Cars connected to data networks making it a connected car helps in reducing pollution. Such connected cars find quick parking space and bypass traffic jams, thus reducing fuel consumption.

However, this may escalate the cost of owning cars. Is there a willingness to pay on the part of car buyers?

Volkswagen wants to transform all their cars into smart phones on wheels by the end of this decade.