autonomous cars for ride-hailing. Google invested in Uber and thus has access to useful, confidential information about the ride-hailing business; Google has the best mapping solutions in the world, the most advanced automated driving solutions and the first vehicles designed from the ground up to be autonomous. It’s hard to imagine any company that’s better poised to capitalize on this opportunity to break Uber’s impending monopoly.
However, as Benedict Evans notes, self-driving technology will commoditize. Given that Google is financing most of the R&D and their history with Android, it’s probable that Googlewants to commoditize autonomous vehicles. At some point, it will not make sense for a single corporation to finance tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of assets. Rather, banks or public markets should finance these assets. It will be interesting to see.
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