The Real War in Driverless Cars—and What It Teaches Us
There are two approaches to developing a driverless car: Build for now, or build for tomorrow. But companies that sit out a round rarely define the future.
If you’ve been reading headlines about driverless cars, you might think that the most important story out there is the war between Tesla and all the old-line carmakers for the future of the automotive industry. That’s true, to some extent. But it’s also beside the point. Underneath all the media buzz, there is a more interesting dynamic playing out: A bet about how quickly driverless cars will arrive. The most important story that you’re not reading is about how to deal with the change that’s coming.
Even if you don’t care much about driverless cars, that story matters. Because underneath it, there’s an essential case study for how smart companies should deal with transformation in a rapidly changing world. And so whether your business is healthcare or cruise ships, the war over driverless cars has something to teach about what you should be doing today.
The Dueling Philosophies
On one side, there are companies such as Tesla, Audi and Cadillac, who have bet that before full autonomous cars arrive, they should be building partly autonomous cars. It’s actually a rare bet — there are far more companies wagering that this transitional period of semi-autonomy will be so brief that it’s better to instead skip those products entirely, and focus on what they’ll deliver in 2021 and beyond. Those companies include Volvo, Ford, GM, BMW, and Daimler — virtually every major car maker out there.
But this isn’t merely a bet that semi-autonomous cars will be quickly outdated — rather, it’s a concession to one of the most historically challenging problems in all of UX: The handoff between a machine and a human. Studies have show that it can take a least thirty seconds for a human to reassume control from a car that’s driving itself. Giving a driver enough warning and enough time to take over is hard — it requires all kinds of monitoring systems and interface design. Volvo, Ford, and all the rest are ducking out of semi-autonomous cars because they’re assuming that solving that problem is so risky that they’d rather avoid having to hand off control to a human altogether — that is, they’d rather work on fully autonomous cars.
Why It Matters
If you zoom out and look at the history of technology, this is a strange bet. Rarely do companies that sit out the hard problems end up winning in the long-run. Think of how the record industry sat by and watched as Apple then Spotify figured out the nuances of a digital music ecosystem; think about how Microsoft sat back and watched as mobile took over the world. If history is any guide, in order to win the war for what’s next, you’ve got to be there for all the little intermediate battles over the present.
The simple reason lies with the user. Companies that hang in for the long, uncertain, and messy work of figuring out the intermediate steps before the future arrives tend to be better prepared once it does. They’ve listened to the user more closely, they’ve learned hard lessons about what works and what doesn’t — and when the product finally is perfected, they’ve got far more credibility to say that they’ve perfected it. They’ve worked out all the nuances and details that turn something from simply being functional to actually being useful, even delightful. Moreover, they’ve brought their customers along for the journey, teaching them what to expect, including them in the palpable sense that they’re living on the cutting edge. That’s a blend of marketing and user engagement that helps build a brand.
Perhaps no company has been better at selling this narrative than Tesla — often to scary results, as when Joshua Brown died driving his Model S while using Autopilot and watching a DVD. But this isn’t to say that creating products on the bleeding edge need be dangerous: Audi has come up with a slew of innovations to make semi-autonomous driving just useful enough that they’re not endangering users.
It may be true that one of the companies that have skipped over creating a semi-autonomous car will end up dominating the hearts and minds of 21st century users. But history has given us plenty of evidence that you can’t innovate by sitting out a round, hoping to catch up on the next. Being there for the messy in-between counts for something — even if it’s not always obvious when you’re making the decisions about what to do today.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
