With the 2019 International Motoring Show in Frankfurt behind us, large car manufacturers gave us an interesting view on their vision of the future of automotive. Various concept cars did not include any dashboard anymore, only a mounting station for your smartphone. For the past decades, all car manufacturers have been developing their own software, which controlled various features of the car and supplied us with navigation. TomTom was one of the earlier challengers, with a share price that was 8 times higher in 2007 than today. 2007 was the year of the iPhone introduction as well, which settled the beginning of TomTom’s demise.
Since then, car manufactures navigations system has been widely replaced with connected, more advanced navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze. These are all attempts of Google to gain share in the automotive industry, with Apple making similar moves.
Car manufacters have been latent into acknowledging and responding to this threat, expect for Tesla. When they first announced that their cars were delivered with built in 3G connection and automatic updates, other car manufacterers did not respond. As of today, every Tesla driving the road is uploading massive amounts of data to the cloud to fuel Tesla’s autonomous driving algorithms (tesla, 2019). The same is happening with the self-driving cars that Google is testing in the united states(google, 2019).
One day our roads will be full with self-driving cars, and as it seems the big tech companies will be the first to succesfully launch the algorithms that would allow this to happen. The business model will be inherently different from traditional car manufacturers. Instead of earning profits by selling cars, these autonomous driving cars will generate the largest part of their profit by “entertaining” you will its driving.
Enjoy your time driving while advertisements are only on the side of the road.
References
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/data-uploaddownload-amounts
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/google-has-developed-self-driving-car/
