Gene J. Puskar / AP A self-driving Uber vehicle.
- Uber and Tesla have put self-driving front and center for their future businesses.
- After a self-driving Uber vehicle was involved in an Arizona fatality, the technology is being questioned.
- Uber and Tesla aren't about autonomous driving - and it's a distraction from their core businesses.
A self-driving Uber vehicle killed a woman in Arizona last week in the first case of an autonomous car being involved in a fatality.
Much testing of self-driving technology has been put on hold while Uber and the authorities investigate the tragedy. And, discussion and debate about the future of autonomous driving has heated up. Some are calling for much higher government scrutiny and regulation of self-driving cars; Arizona has been singled out because with good year-round weather and excellent roads, along with a hands-off attitude toward testing, it's attracted many of the major players.
But others think that the genie has been released from the bottle. At an auto-finance conference in Las Vegas last week, Automotive News reported that General Motors President Dan Ammann said people will develop more confidence in driverless vehicles once the cars show what they can do.
GM is pushing hard, through its Cruise division, to get a fully autonomous, no-driver vehicle on the road in a ride-hailing framework in the next few years. If the company succeeds, it could take the lead in a business that could play to its strengths as a carmaker able to build fully integrated self-driving cars at scale.
Stakes that look much higher - but really aren't
Cruise A Cruise self-driving vehicle.
But if GM fails, it still has its highly profitable legacy business to fall back on. For the likes of Uber and Tesla, the stakes have been presented as being much higher. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick saw autonomy as imperative, given Uber's driver costs. And Tesla has for several years with its Autopilot technology been attempting to avoid being left behind. CEO Elon Musk has taken a personal interest in the effort.
But the truth is that a revolution in autonomy won't ultimately affect Tesla's and Uber's business all that much. Unlike GM, Tesla has nothing in the way of a ride-sharing service ready to launch, and Uber's success hasn't been in getting drivers out from behind the wheel, but in putting more drivers in cars so that the company can continue to expand and grow, increasing the number of trips it provides, thereby maintaining its massive market-share lead over competitors like Lyft.
Fundamentals matter, even though Musk might want to change the Tesla story and Kalanick, before he was forced out of Uber as CEO, wanted to supercharge Uber's value by eliminating its biggest expense. Tesla is still almost entirely a company that makes electric cars. Uber is an app-enabled, low-friction alternative to taxis and livery cabs.
Both companies have achieved mighty valuations with those fundamental business propositions: Tesla's market cap is over $50 billion, while Uber's investors have pushed it to $50-$70 billion on paper, depending on how much of an impact you think Softbank's recent 20% stake lowered the value.
Neither may ultimately be worth that much (although Uber certainly looks like it has the chance to be the biggest Silicon Valley IPO since Facebook), and Tesla certainly appears overvalued based on its performance - or lack of it. The carmaker's Model 3 mass-market vehicle was launched last July with promises that Tesla would be building 5,000 per week by now. It would be lucky it if were building 1,000 - the company is mired in what Musk has called "production hell."
Not for nothing, Tesla hasn't really made any money in 14 years, has a balance sheet heavy with debt, and burned through over $3 billion in 2017.
Technologies that aren't mission-critical
Tesla A Tesla on Autopilot.
Up against those challenges, Tesla's Autopilot tech is interesting but hardly mission-critical. Customers obviously can't use it if they can't get a Model 3 until 2019 0r 2020. Uber's self-driving roll-out in Pittsburgh in 2016 was spectacular, but since then, the vehicles have been in test-test-test mode while the startup has endured an epic management crisis and Kalanick's departure. Again, not exactly mission-critical.
What we're seeing here is something of a bandwagon effect for companies whose value is tied up less in execution than in storytelling. Electric cars were the cool, "disruptive" story that made Musk and Tesla investors rich from 2010 until now. Driverless cars that can be summoned using an iPhone, anywhere and anytime, suggested Uber on steroids. You think $70 billion is impressive? Just wait until we don't have to pay drivers anymore.
So Tesla and Uber jumped on that bandwagon with the technology clearly still in a pre-beta phase. They didn't do it because it was important to their respective businesses. They did it because it could keep the story fresh and exciting.
But, you might ask, aren't GM and other traditional carmakers doing the same thing?
Well, sort of. The self-driving story has improved investor outlook in GM. But that's a Wall Street thing. GM wants to attack the autonomous opportunity because it has a realistic chance to be dominant, with the capacity to build millions of autonomous vehicles every year, around the world.
GM also thinks self-driving vehicles will be safer, and it ought to know. About 40,000 people die annually in the US alone in auto accidents. A percentage of those accidents involve GM cars and trucks. That's why Ammann doesn't think the Uber fatality in Arizona is the end of the road. Self-driving cars could be the biggest enhancement to safety GM has seen in its history.
When self-driving is a distraction
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
The bottom line is that while it might seem that a self-driving death and its aftermath is a threat to Uber's and Tesla's ambitions, it isn't. That's because their self-driving efforts don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Tesla dealt with an Autopilot-related fatality in 2016, but it didn't cause hundreds of thousands of Model 3 reservation-holders to cancel.
That raises a question, and it's an ethical one. If Uber and Tesla don't need self-driving tech to prosper, then why are they offering it - and testing it when it's clear that the bugs haven't been worked out? Kalanick's argument was that Uber needs it to survive as a business. Musk's is that safety is more important, in fact, than selling cars.
Musk's point is stronger, but even so, Tesla's business at the moment has to be all about getting cars out of its factory, not about those cars driving themselves once they hit the road. So even though the inevitable tragedies that will be associated with the development of autonomous vehicles aren't going to affect Tesla's business in a major way, that doesn't mean Tesla should continue with the experiment. Likewise, Uber.
In the end, it could be best to leave self-driving cars to the companies that have been dealing with human-driven cars for over a century.
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