January 8, 2022 – For years, automakers have told a specific story about how self-driving cars would arrive in the world. They would be shared and electric, fleets of ride-hail vehicles shuttling passengers like fancy taxis.
Now, almost a decade into the self-driving experiment, the future looks more complicated. Progress on AVs has slowed and that has the companies looking for other ways to make money off self-driving tech. “The easiest way to actually make money from autonomy is to offer it as a feature for the consumer market,” says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst with Gartner.
Meanwhile, cameras and sensors like lidar have gotten cheaper. The result: Some players are shifting, subtly, to a new business strategy—selling automated features directly to consumers. The notion of a personal self-driving car is attractive to many.
