Google’s chance to dominate the robot car market is quickly slipping away

Self driving car software has made a lot of progress in the last year, none more so than Google’s own offering. The Google car has learned about railroad crossings and cyclist hand signals, highway shoulder etiquette and the government hell-mazes we call construction zones. Though some companies have been working on self-driving technology for longer than Google, feature announcements from rivals like Audi, Tesla, and Volvo imply that their software still lags in that kind of detailed, everyday versatility. Perhaps more importantly, Google has cemented a nigh-Kleenex level of brand association with the concept of the self-driving car. You’d think that Google, a company built on convincing third parties to use its software solutions, would have no trouble parlaying such a powerful lead into a market stranglehold to make Android look like Google+. Yet, the more progress it makes, the more anxious the search giant seems to become.

The reason is simple: government regulation could scuttle the business strategy that has worked so well for Google in the past. Google has a long and storied history of aggressive expansion, but always in areas where their biggest limitations are their own resources and the complacency of their competitors — both of which are functionally infinite. In the case of Android, Google developed a non-Apple mobile OS that was advanced enough to attract a few major partners. This forced most other manufacturers to either adopt it as well or endure years of inferiority as their proprietary options rushed to catch up. Some smartphone manufacturers (rhymes with “Hamsung”) likely entered the Android relationship with the explicit intent to someday switching to an in-house alternative; unsurprisingly, few companies have gone on to actually spend the millions it would take to reinvent the wheel in this way.

Volvo’s attempts at self-driving at attracting a fair amount of attention, themselves.

Still, few if any of us would be using Android today, had the mobile OS launched next to similarly full-featured offerings from Samsung, LG, and HTC; it was the search giant’s ability to quick-march its coders to the center of an empty mobile space that gave Google the all-important advantage, and it has yet to cede that high ground. In the case of self-driving cars, though, government inspection and public reticence threaten to stall a consumer roll-out long enough to allow competitors to catch up. With Audi touting rally-speed driving up dirt roads, and Volvo thinking of self-driving software as a natural fit for its safety-based brand, Google’s heels are being nipped from just about every direction. Even the military likely has a version in the works — and while it could conceivably trounce Google’s performance, we of course have no way of knowing for sure.
That means Google will have a much harder time convincing partners to come on board, its implicit threat of obsolescence being so much less powerful this go-round. The search giant seems to understand its dilemma, recently cementing a number of partnerships with parts manufacturers like Continental AG. This suggests that it could be at least considering building its own in-house vehicles, which implies the Google car might be headed for something more like the Chromebook model — a very good idea, but perhaps still not enough.

Mercedes is definitely well-positioned to exploit the futuristic designs of Minority Report.

Chromebooks are a particularly stark example of Google’s approach to markets: first dream up the customers you want to serve, then create those customers and convince them they need service. Faced with widespread skepticism about the online-only laptops, Google began its push by producing Chromebooks itself. The hope was to stimulate the market and incentivize competition from companies like Asus, Lenovo, and HP, and it worked beautifully. Today, Google has gladly backed off the hardware business almost entirely; the only Google-made Chromebooks left are super-high-end models the likes of which other manufacturers still mostly ignore.
Fiber seems destined for the same fate; if the optical broadband offering can successfully shock the cable companies into competing, Google may begin selling its networks of optical cable to someone with the slightest interest in actually maintaining them.