The difference of a driverless and a self-driving car explained

Although Google started their project as the “Google Self-Driving Car”, they should have branded it as the driverless car, because there is a critical difference. A driverless car has no steering wheel, less a gas pedal or even brakes.

Why is it important to distinguish between those two concepts, that both are referred to as autonomous cars? Because there is a misconception that automated driver assistance systems (ADAS) will evolve gradually into a driverless car.

Numerous carmakers take the approach to add self-driving features such as adaptive cruise control, auto parking, lane departure warning systems, or forward collision warning. They listen to the customers who want to stay in control of the vehicle any time. The self-driving car requires an alert driver ready to take over the wheel at any moment if anything goes wrong. But guess what? We as humans are capable to maintain the continuous state of alert that would be needed to take over in a split second the driver assistance system. And our reaction time is at least 5 times slower then a computer.

And so there is also the difference in approach from Google and conventional carmakers. They began meeting in 2012 with the intention of teaming up, but it didn’t work. As it turns out, Google wanted to jump quickly and create a fully autonomous car, while the carmakers felt a gradual rollout of autonomous features on existing cars would be a better idea. Car manufacturers aren’t quite sure if they should treat Google as a friend or foe. Interestingly, a study by KPMG last year found that American consumers would trust brands like Google and Apple for self-driving cars more than they would automakers.

Why the incremental approach? Customers will more likely feel comfortable with a slower introduction to this new technology rather than all in one swoop is the marketing viewpoint. But more important is the threat of the driverless vehicle for the automotive industry. Once the cost are brought down and the legal and regulatory issues overcome, vehicle sales will fall by 40% as these “robotaxis’ replace personal car ownership. Try selling that concept to the board of any car manufacturer.

So in the end it will be very hard for the auto industry to compete on the field of driverless car mobility services. It means cannibalizing their own products, completely transforming their purchase-oriented business model, which has served them well for more than a century, towards a service-oriented model, and fundamentally rethinking the concept of a car.

Anyhow, in the end the car will transform to how it already was named in ancient history: an auto mobile.