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Why The Idea of a Google Driverless Car is Nonsense

This article is more than 10 years old.

The tech press in the USA typically refers to the driverless car as "the Google driverless car" and talks this up as an opportunity for the search giant to move beyond its current business model. I don't think so.

Here's why this opportunity is messy.

Driverless car projects have been around for 30 years. Anyone following European R&D in this area can easily cast their minds back to the DRIVE project, part of the EU's RACE program in the 1980s. And then the Eureka program's version: "the €800 million EC EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987–1995)."

Chunka Mui has a series running here on Forbes about this disruptive business opportunity. Much as I respect Chunka's leadership in disruptive innovation thinking, the analysis is too US-centric. And the idea of a $2 trillion market in the US is overblown.

There's clearly something in the air around driverless cars. They are scary in prospect, though potentially safer than human driving but it is the business opportunity that is causing a stir. Is it a US opportunity or a Google opportunity?

European car makers began researching driverless cars thirty years ago because the European highways were already showing signs of being overburdened by the volume of traffic.

That's why Volvo was allowed last year to test driverless cars on a European highway at speeds over 50 miles an hour. I wrote about it last May here on Forbes:

Following Google’s experiment with an autonomous car on the streets of Las Vegas, Volvo pulled off the more impressive feat of platooning the three cars behind a lorry for 200 kilometres on a busy Spanish motorway.

The Wall St Journal ran the Volvo story in December:

The 85-year-old company believes it can produce an accident free vehicle in just seven years. "Our vision is that no one is killed or injured in a new Volvo by 2020," said Anders Eugensson, Volvo's head of government affairs.

Volvo hopes to launch its first cars in 2014. Nissan believes 2020 is a watershed year. Given that Volvo is owned by a Chinese auto-maker that means China and Japan have solid intentions in the near term. Go here for information about the BMW driverless car and here for the Wikipedia page on autonomous driving.

You might then ask why in the USA is this being left to a search company?

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