Data And Scale Are The Keys To Autonomous Vehicle Technology

There is certainly plenty of autonomous vehicle technology to be excited about in coming years. However, according to RBC analyst Joseph Spak, bringing this type of advanced technology to the mass market may prove to be much more challenging than investors are anticipating.

So far, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has been considered the leader in autonomous vehicles, but Spak points out that even Google’s fleet is only 57 vehicles with about 1.6 million cumulative autonomous miles driven so far.

Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has “Autopilot” equipped on roughly 75,000 vehicles, but the feature is far from fully autonomous driving. Still, Tesla is able to collect roughly 2.5 million miles of data per day and will likely update the Autopilot features once it is comfortable with safety.

General Motors Company (NYSE: GM), which is not typically associated with the automotive technology revolution, has OnStar equipped on all 3.0 million units that it sells each year in the U.S. GM is currently working with Mobileye NV (NYSE: MBLY) on its road-experience management (REM) localization product. That means that GM could soon have the ability to collect roughly 100 million miles of data per day in the U.S. alone.

“The main point is to reflect on how sheer scale can benefit incumbent automakers and be a challenge new entrants must overcome,” Spak concludes.

UBS anticipates that tech companies will continue to partner with legacy automakers for the sake of optimizing critical data gathering.

Disclosure: the author holds no position in the stocks mentioned.