The smartest people in the auto industry are spending billions to solve a problem that doesn't exist
A decade ago, if you'd uttered the word "disruption" around auto executives, you'd have been greeted with blank stares.
Now, you don't even have to do the uttering - the auto execs are more than happy to delve into how aggressively they're trying to disrupt themselves.
Harvard Business School's Michael L. Tushman calls this an "existential question" in a recent post at the Harvard Business Review:
It's admirable that heavy-duty business thinkers are tackling this question, and tackling it now with urgency.
But I think they're also falling prey to two tendencies at once: the need to formulate problems to solve - and then the need to solve them, in short order, or at least develop a strategic context in which the problem can be addressed in such a way that the traditional auto industry can defend itself.
The Big Question on which all this hinges is, "Will electric, self-driving cars arrive sooner than anyone expects?"
The Big Question isn't, I should point out, "Will electric, self-driving cars arrive?" They will, inevitably. It's merely a matter of time.
An unaddressed variable
But that's the massive, unaddressed variable in the this discussion. How long will it take before the traditional business of the traditional automakers no longer works? Embedded in this time variable is a common business school assumption, which is that there's no way the incumbent can fend off the disruptor, long term. General Motors and Toyota will be supplanted - we just don't know how long it will take.
Frankly, the auto industry is taking this "existential question" far too seriously. There are over a billion cars currently roving planet Earth (and that's just cars - I'm not even talking about big trucks and other types of non-passenger mobility). Even if a dozen Teslas and Ubers appear in the next ten years, it will be decades before all those largely gas-powered cars are displaced.
A hundred years of industrial history will be challenging to eradicate. Gas-powered cars are still a practical, affordable form of transportation. They are not the horse of the 20th century, lingering too long in the 21st.
So the existential question is really a marginal question. Everyone is simply trying to prepare for the tipping point, the moment at which it becomes absolutely clear that electric, self-driving cars will take over. Innovation is happening, and accelerating, but it's at the margins. Uber still requires hundreds of thousands if not millions of good old-fashioned gas cars to even have a business. Tesla's most optimistic sales numbers would give it only a small percentage of the global auto market by 2020.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with thinking about the impending change. But a more significant question these days is whether the auto industry is over-investing in a slow-motion self-disruption, driven more by cultural enthusiasm for new ideas than by facts on the ground.