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As the market for autonomous vehicle surges at a great pace, a report revealed that the global autonomous vehicle market was estimated at US$ 54.23 billion in 2019, and is expected to hit US$ 556.67 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 39.47 percent from 2019 to 2026. It is also expected that Level 4 and 5 autonomous cars will emerge out as a large market by 2030 at US$ 60 billion globally.
Observing the geographical acceleration of the technology, North America contributed to more than two-fifths of the total market share in 2019 and is predicted to stay dominant throughout the forecast period. Also, the European market is projected to grow at the fastest CAGR of 42.59 percent during 2019–2026.
As reported by the studies, the key market players analyzed in the global autonomous vehicle market are Daimler AG, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, AB Volvo, Volvo-Autoliv-Ericsson-Zenuity alliance, Groupe SA, Tesla Inc, BMW AG, and Toyota Motor Corporation.
Here is the list of 2020-2021 predictions by some of the major aforementioned automakers regarding deployment of the autonomous vehicle in upcoming years.
As of 2019, Cruise Automation (acquired by GM in 2017) is focusing on testing their autonomous vehicles in select cities including California, Arizona, and Michigan. According to former GM President and current Cruise CEO Daniel Ammann, "in order to reach the level of performance and safety validation required to deploy a fully driverless service in San Francisco, we will be significantly increasing our testing and validation miles over the balance of this year, which has the effect of carrying the timing of fully driverless deployment beyond the end of the year."
Additionally, General Motors has asked the federal government for clearance on developing self-driving cars that do not possess steering wheels.
In 2019, Ford's Argo AI invested US$15 million into creating an Autonomous Vehicle Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University which is famous for its machine learning department.
The research center for the next five years will focus on improving self-driving technology, including more refined sensors and more robust algorithms.
Ford's President of Mobility, Marcy Klevoran, said, in general, Ford tests its self-driving cars in cities in which it's "really difficult… to prove capability" (in other words, cities with a lot of people, construction, and unconventional roads and intersections). This could train the algorithms that supply the self-driving capacity of the cars for more unexpected, hectic situations. As a result, these cars would be more likely to stop, turn, or a slowdown in a variety of nuanced situations that call for it.
Honda's goal was to have cars that can at least drive themselves on highways by 2020, however, this aim may not be possible due to recent developments. As Honda ended its talks with Alphabet's Waymo in 2018 over differences in how both parties wanted their work together to roll out, it shortly after that, bought into GM's Cruise to create an autonomous vehicle specific to Cruise.
Apparently, Honda is having a tough time incorporating self-driving technology as compared to GM and Ford.
Since 2015, Toyota invested US$1 billion over five years in the Toyota Research Institute to develop robotics and AI technology as the company hoped to launch products based on its Highway Teammate programs in 2020.
According to Gill Pratt, the CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, "none of the companies in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true Level 5 (learn more about self-driving cars' autonomous levels) autonomy. They are not even close."
This year the company made an announcement that it will be employing NVIDIA's technology to bolster its autonomous vehicles.
Renault-Nissan has partnered with Waymo to work on self-driving car technology for its vehicles and is planning to release 10 different self-driving cars by 2020. According to CEO Carlos Ghosn, "So we know that autonomy is something of high interest for the consumers. This is the first brick — one-lane highway. Then you're going to have a multi-lane highway, and then you're going to have urban driving. All of these steps are going to come before 2020. […] 2020 for the autonomous car in urban conditions, probably 2025 for the driverless car."
As Volvo is betting that self-driving cars will change both the ride-sharing industry and the luxury car market, it entered a joint venture worth US$300 million with Uber in 2016 to develop next-generation autonomous driving cars. Volvo is providing the physical vehicles for Uber's self-driving tests and both the companies are still working together as of 2019. According to CEO Hakan Samuelsson, "It's our ambition to have a car that can drive fully autonomously on the highway by 2021."
Hyundai partnered with Russian search company Yandex, which has been working on self-driving car technology, in 2019. Reportedly, as admitted by Yandex, the goal of the partnership is to "to create a self-driving platform that can be used by any car manufacturer or taxi fleet."
An investment of US$ 30 million has been made in self-driving developer Aurora, to integrate the latter's technology into one of Hyundai's vehicle lines.
In 2019, Daimler partnered with BMW for flourishing their own ride-sharing service in competition with Uber, combining five of their ride-hailing services. According to Harald Kreuger, CEO of BMW, "The five services will melt together more and more into a mobility offering with fully electric and self-driving fleets…This will be a central pillar of our strategy as a mobility provider."
Daimler's Mercedes and BMW also formed an alliance to work on creating Level 4 self-driving cars. Both the companies are eyeing 2024 for the commercial release of the vehicles.
Fiat-Chrysler began work with Waymo to test self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans in 2016. Also, Fiat-Chrysler's late CEO Sergio Marchionne suspected self-driving cars could be on the road by 2021. The company has continued to work with Waymo. John Krafcik, Waymo's CEO, stated that the company planned to launch 10 Chrysler Pacificas through Lyft at the end of June 2019. Additionally, Fiat-Chrysler entered into a partnership with Aurora as well in 2019.
Tesla has announced its plan to provide its vehicles with a software update sometime by the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 that would allow "full self-driving." According to Wired, Tesla head Elon Musk elaborated on this timeline, suggesting that Tesla will be fully autonomous by the end of 2020.
* Based on insights from Jon Walker's article published in Emerj
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