While every large global auto maker has been sinking billions of dollars in experimenting with autonomous car technology, a low profile, little known start-up, nuTonomy, kicked off operations of the world’s first self-driving ‘semi autonomous’ taxi in Singapore.
A number of other well-established companies are engaged in the race to commercialise autonomous cars. Google has been testing its fleet of driverless cars for years and has clocked close to 2.5 million km.
Tesla has developed ‘connected cars’ technology with machine learning algorithms where each driver is actually training his car to ‘self-drive’, sharing enormous amount of driving experiences across the connected fleet.
Clubbed with ‘three dimensional mapping’ technologies, hundreds of times more detailed than traditional maps, the learning of cars to ‘self drive’ is exponentially faster. Tesla’s ‘auto-pilot’ feature in its Model S cars is rapidly teaching its cars to drive efficiently and safely.
Other large players are not far behind. Apple’s project titan is rumoured to be for a cutting edge self-driving car. Audi has already revealed a number of autonomous vehicle prototypes and is working on commercialisation in 2022.
Baidu, the Chinese company, together with BMW is in advanced stages of its own self-drive car. Players like Ford and Bosch are not far off and are aiming to deliver their first model by 2022. Uber is reported to be close to introducing its driverless taxi service in Pittsburgh.
In spite of all these biggies in the running, nuTonomy becoming the world’s first player to pick up passengers using a ‘semi autonomous’ taxi, has come as a pleasant surprise.
Innovation from smaller companies
This is where possibly ‘lean and agile’ start-ups such as nuTonomy have an inherent advantage. They are wired with a culture that fosters exclusively on innovation, primarily stemming from the academia partnership, which successful large companies struggle to garner. Larger players are lost in focus, between ‘scaling’ their past innovations and aspiring for new disruptions.
A nuTonomy self-driving taxi drives on the road in its public trial in Singapore August 25, 2016. REUTERS/Edgar Su
NuTonomy, a small start-up nurtured by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specialises in developing software to build self-driving cars and autonomous mobile robots. It is merely two-and-a-half years old. Currently, it has a team of 50 employees in Massachusetts and Singapore.
It is a fact that disruptive innovation invariably stems from smaller companies. More interestingly, when the same ‘highly innovative’ small company grows to become larger in size, its innovation quotient rapidly diminishes.
Big is bulky
Today, Apple, earlier known to be one of the most innovative companies, is widely criticised for its dwindling innovation quotient, as the organisation is becoming larger and its focus has shifted to reap returns on investments it has made in its past innovations; the ‘digital hub’ connected platform and the iOS software.
Tesla, for example, has been the frontrunner in commercialising ‘zero emission’ vehicles using advanced battery technologies. It recently announced its ‘second master plan’ that will focus on integrating solar roof-top panels with the batteries that will deliver value to domestic and commercial customers meeting their energy generation, storage and distribution needs. While the plan promises that customers could go completely ‘grid-free’ for their energy requirements, it also focuses on moving its range of electric cars to become autonomous and driverless.
A number of problems seem to be creeping into the Tesla models ranging from the centre screen going blank to more complicated issues like problems in power and charging equipment.
With the responsibility of scaling up its zero emission vehicles to reap a return on investments that have been made over the last decade, the task of sizing up innovation to get a fully autonomous car to the market ahead of the competition is quite daunting. Again, an added focus on energy is diluting the game. A typical problem of losing focus; which all successful large companies face!
Google recognised this problem and has now restructured its entire operations, under Alphabet, into several small, nimble and responsive clusters. This helps large scaled-up operations like Android operating systems, YouTube and the search businesses to function independently and focus on ‘scale’ while smaller and more innovative businesses like driverless cars are structured under Alphabet’s subsidiary company ‘Google X’, providing the culture that is required for innovation to thrive.
In addition to driverless cars, Google has other small and independent companies that develop highly innovative and disruptive projects that include life extension.
Challenges ahead
Moving forward, for nuTonomy, there are a number of challenges. First of all, it has to successfully advance its ‘semi-autonomous’ vehicles to become fully autonomous. Singapore may be an ideal testing ground for the ‘semi autonomous’ experiment given its stable weather, great infrastructure and drivers who tend to obey traffic rules. However, when such a fully autonomous model has to be replicated across more unforgiving terrains and volatile traffic conditions, the challenges could be immense.
More importantly, if nuTonomy manages to commercialise a fully autonomous vehicle ahead of the competition, it has to work on ‘scale’ to secure the returns on its innovation investments, which by itself will dilute its focus to remain a frontrunner in its next level of innovation!