GM, Waymo Top Ranking of Autonomous Car Leaders

A new study names General Motors Co. and Waymo LLC as the leaders in the autonomous car race, while placing highly touted competitors such as Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. at the back of the pack. The study, published by Navigant Research, cited General Motors and Waymo (formerly known as the Google self-driving car project) for its efforts to move autonomous cars closer to production. "There's a vast difference between developing an autonomous car as an R&D project and building one as a real product," Sam Abuelsamid, the study's author, told Design News. "Both of these companies have built in the redundancies on the compute side and on the sensor side. The Navigant Research Leaderboard, as it's known, ranks 19 companies on 10 different automated driving criteria. Those include strategic vision, go-to-market planning, technology, production strategy, sales and marketing, product capability, product quality, product portfolio, partners, and staying power. Four of the top five companies in the study were traditional automakers. Others in the top five were the Daimler AG-Robert Bosch GmbH team, Ford Motor Co., and Volkswagen Group. GM, in particular, was singled out for its ability to put the technology in the hands of the consumer, and its willingness to treat the autonomous car as more than a science project. "All of GM's engineering teams back in Michigan are doing the same things for the autonomous Bolt as they would for any other program," Abuelsamid said. While Waymo LLC did not have some of built-in industry advantages of GM, it nevertheless scored well in the study because of its commitment to putting the technology on the road. Waymo has launched an "early rider" program in Phoenix and has teamed with Fiat Chrysler to test its hardware and software on Chrysler Pacifica minivans. In contrast, Tesla Inc. landed at the back of the pack, largely due to its lack of engineering execution and poor partner relationships. "Their technology is behind the rest of the pack because of their insistence on not using Lidar," Abuelsamid told us. "Also, they don't have redundant compute platforms.