Carmakers Step Up Autonomous Vehicle Efforts Amid New Competition

Carmakers are reportedly refocusing their efforts to roll out autonomous vehicles amid new competition.

That’s according to a report Sunday (Nov. 2) from the Financial Times (FT), which cited the example of General Motors. The company halted plans to build robotaxis last year, but said recently it would introduce an “eyes-off, hands-free” semi-autonomous driving system in its vehicles starting in 2028. 

At the same time, competitors like Volkswagen and Stellantis are working with Uber to scale up its autonomous vehicle fleet.

The report contends that legacy carmakers have long struggled to keep up with advances in self-driving technology from companies like Waymo and Baidu, leading them to team with Uber and woo talent from Apple and other big tech firms.

GM’s work is being led by its new chief product officer and driverless tech pioneer Sterling Anderson, co-founder of driverless vehicle startup Aurora and the one-time head of Tesla’s Autopilot efforts.

“Autonomy will make our roads safer. It will be the cornerstone of GM’s modern portfolio going forward,” Anderson said.

The FT added that analysts say the pivot toward autonomous technology poses a dilemma for traditional car companies, as scaling a robotaxi service will require heavy investment at a time when the auto industry is already struggling with high costs.

“The carmakers need to produce profit and cash whereas the big tech giants need to produce growth. The market is not holding them to the same agenda, which gives the tech giants a much greater advantage to pursue things like robotaxis,” HSBC analyst Mike Tyndall said.

In related news, PYMNTS spoke in September with Rylan Hamilton, founder of Blue Water Autonomy, which hopes to make autonomous ships for the U.S. Navy. He told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that these ships are smaller as they don’t carry people, making them faster and easier to build and deploy.

“You put the payloads on top, in containers and you send it out to sea,” Hamilton, himself a veteran of the Navy, told Webster.

Blue Water is designing an autonomous ship that can be built in every region of the country, he added, without having to vie for capacity at the Navy’s major shipyards.

Hamilton noted that autonomy technology has matured beyond expensive, one-off experiments. 

“Traditionally there hasn’t been a huge market for maritime autonomy in terms of [simply] making a ship more expensive with additional sensors on top of it,” he said, “but there’s been a shift where this technology’s becoming more commoditized, so you don’t need thousands of people to go and write software.”

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