easily scaling, many in the community didn’t realize how hard it would be to engineer autonomous vehicles—in the early days, they thought they could simply put some sensors on top of a car and let it drive itself, he adds.
“Silicon Valley is not a great place for manufacturing,” he points out. “There are a lot of challenges, but quality is just one. There’s also crash testing, powertrain testing, etcetera. And can we scale it up? I don’t see why [Detroit’s manufacturing infrastructure] would relocate to Silicon Valley, but that’s what it takes to build a car. That’s where Silicon Valley is frankly not educated enough, which required auto companies coming here to collaborate and show them how the industry works.”
Beiker says the auto industry has some “very smart thinkers,” and he particularly praises Mary Barra, the CEO of GM. However, he feels that the auto industry absolutely needs Silicon Valley to keep pushing it forward.
“We wouldn’t be talking about electric vehicles without Tesla or Google, or shared mobility without Uber,” he says. “The auto industry is a well-oiled machine—it really works and it has to, because, unlike the cell phone industry, it runs on very thin margins. I’m thankful we have people in Silicon Valley kicking the behinds of the auto industry. I’m convinced there are boardroom meetings in Detroit where they say, ‘Why is Silicon Valley getting all the limelight when we’ve been talking about autonomous vehicles since Futurama in 1939?’ They want to be agile and nimble and open to evolution. I would guess Mary Barra is kicking behinds.”
Although many in the mobility world are obsessed with when we’ll see driverless cars on the road, with some predicting it will happen by the early 2020s—and are feverishly competing to be first—to Beiker, it’s more about where and how than when.
“I tell companies it’ll be sooner than they think, but it won’t look the way they think it will,” he says. “It could be much more like a shuttle service with a car company partner. The nice thing about dramatic timelines is it won’t take long before we find out if it’s true or not.”
Beiker sees full autonomy coming to fruition closer to 2040 than 2020. He likes to use an Amazon metaphor when illustrating the many unknowable aspects related to the future of mobility: When Amazon first came on the scene in the 1990s, we knew what a bookstore was and we knew what the Internet was, but nobody predicted the online bookseller would one day transform into a massive retail and logistics operation going far beyond books.
“In that analogy, the bookstore is the car, and the Internet is autonomy, and we know what both are so therefore we know what an autonomous vehicle is,” he maintains. Players in the mobility industry would do well to remember Amazon’s journey to market dominance, he adds.
“There might be an Amazon at some point not offering cars for purchase, but giving passengers a different vision of mobility,” he contends. “In other words, they might not give us books via the Internet, but completely change the way we interact with our stuff.”
