What's The Autonomy Economy?

Who stands to win and who stands to lose when the robots colonize our roads? Look to the usual suspects.

- Pete Bigelow

Long before mobility became an auto-industry buzzword, before partyers could summon a ride via an app on something called an iPhone, and before Silicon Valley and Detroit became alleged rivals, William Clay Ford Jr. could foresee the tectonic forces pushing to upend traditional transportation.

As early as the turn of this century, he prodded Ford Motor Company to reckon with a future that would demand more energy efficiency and pollution reduction from its vehicles while also understanding that future populations would be more concentrated in megacities that couldn’t absorb additional traffic. In 2007, with a mind toward creating business models that matched such a future, he proposed that the company explore alternate modes of transit. “I’m not sure the term ‘mobility’ existed, but I wanted to invest in transportation solutions that were different,” Ford says.

A few years before that, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency lured a band of engineering geeks to the Mojave Desert for a competition, offering a seven-figure prize to the team that ran a driverless vehicle through its grueling off-road course the fastest. No car made it farther than 7.4 miles into the 142-mile course of the first DARPA Grand Challenge. Five robocars completed the race the following year, and in the rapid progress of subsequent Challenges, Google saw enough promise in the technology to launch its own automated-car project in 2009.

Those decisions have proved prescient. Venture capitalists poured more than $1 billion into automotive-related tech companies in 2016, and they’ve already surpassed $2.6 billion in such investments throughout the first eight months of this year, according to CB Insights, a market analytics firm. Silicon Valley tech giants, startups, and traditional automakers alike are rushing to address potential new markets as a result.