Driven

What happens in automotive - Ford's assembly line system, steering wheels, transmissions, fuels, safety belts, turbo chargers, robotics and now intelligence - precedes other big moves in other industries - because automotive brings a powerful mix of technologies to work together, and from there they gather consumers and build a market.  And what Alex Davies is showing us with this latest and perhaps biggest change - the autonomous vehicle - will have growing impact long after this year's models have rusted out.  Because what it took to get here - on the verge of driverless age - is the excitement of innovation and race-hot competition.

Let's start with the phrase "self-driving" car, not a good description of what we now call an autonomous vehicle.  Perhaps the misnomer explains why the concept has come of age in fits and starts.  What we learned about the time to perfect and market early airbags is a stretch example; better yet, think of distance sensors that sound alarms and apply braking when obstacles appear in a car's "vision."  These relatively simple automotive changes have, despite their safety arguments, taken longer for adoption than car-makers expected.  The road from concept to design innovation was not without starts and stops, and even big litigation. 

But author Davies takes us from earliest concepts at DARPA, through the very early innovators who dreamed of automotive intelligence combined with design and vision systems to get us there.  Along the way some creators switched their targets, realizing that what we see as an automobile was going to look and behave very differently from what was described as a self-driving, or autonomous vehicle.  There were conflicts and disagreements as contributors moved to exercise their own vision of a driverless car.

One and one-half years after being called and cross-examined in the lawsuit Waymo vs. Uber, engineer Anthony Levandowski, having been grilled by attorneys over his work at Uber, strapped himself into a Toyota Prius and set out cross country.  He wanted to prove a concept drawn up in 2009 by the Chauffeur team.  Levandowski made few stops and within three days the Prius landed in New York City, having exercised its vision systems to take car and driver safely over high-speed multi-lane highways filled with a variety of traffic and human drivers.  But the Prius prevailed with only two glitches, one in Utah where the human driver momentarily intervened, and one in Nevada when the pair were stopped by police who  wondered why this small vehicle was travelling under the speed limit!  What may have begun as an experiment moving military vehicles had graduated to the ordinary human driver consumer - with sights on a safer, smarter mass market.

Innovation is US industry's sole remaining competitive advantage, and this crazy exciting story of the race to become autonomous teaches us where innovation comes from and how one guy can make all the difference, despite whatever teams and grants and long-term strategies offer.  If you want to see how one very BIG idea got trimmed and molded to a point of reality, read this book.  Its an awesome tribute to all our other big ideas that somehow, not quite magically, started out in one form and finally took a seat right next to us, in real life - black clunky telephones, Eniacs the size of rooms, and thin glass vials filled with heavenly vaccines.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com