How the driverless cars hype is quickly going to become a reality.

Hollywood loves driverless cars. Sarum rated Minority Report for its glimpse into a driverless future. Even the media loves stories of prototype driverless cars getting lost, going too slowly or simply looking odd. It all provided great entertainment about tech biting off more than it could chew but as for a driverless reality? Sarum was one of the non-believers.

The recent CES Las Vegas Show again “did” driverless cars, but that is probably par for the course. Talk of a big deal which would see Ford manufacture a car for Google did not feature. Elsewhere, Tesla punted their own driverless offering in which the car would come and find the driver using GPS from his or her smart phone. Clearly, tech is not afraid of floating big ideas that will change the world.

For Sarum, the reality check is that the FT is now convinced that Californians are going to make this happen. They are not a newspaper that gets swept along with every fad that sells copy elsewhere in the press. Lo and behold, a few weeks later The Economist beat the same drum, offering up an excellent analysis of the total upheaval in the motor industry model that will surely begin when driverless cars hit the roads.

Tesla Self Driving Cars Could soon be on the roads

Tesla Self Driving Cars Could soon be on the roads

With two of the biggest thinkers in world business backing the driverless car revolution, Sarum was unsurprised when peering into Saturday’s FT to find that Sergio Marchionne, CEO of FIAT and auto industry oligarch, is fretting about the impending threat to his industry from Silicon Valley.

Car manufacturers are scrambling to make new alliances and develop strategies in response to something that until very recently appeared nothing more than a dream. Inevitably, some people will be left with the wrong hardware and nowhere left to turn. The “auto industry” prides itself on tracing its evolution back through incremental changes stretching back to Karl Benz spluttering around in his first four wheeler in 1885. Yes there have been new entrants over the decades that have joined the party and quite often brought something new, but by and large the model was the same.

The driverless car from Google is certainly something to look at.

The driverless car from Google is certainly something to look at.

Being realistic, could Silicon Valley really tear up the hundred year old business model and do something differently, pushing the entrenched industry out into the cold? What about Tesla? As the bad boys of auto innovation, is this a taste of things to come? Maybe. The assumption is that they will be there early on with driverless tech. That is not unrealistic. From left of field Tesla has stolen a march on electric car technology with a start-up now shipping over 50,000 vehicles a year. It is simply staggering. But 50K of vehicles per annum is still relatively small production by the standards of the global players. Can Tesla or a newcomer scale up to mega production? Certainly all the independent global suppliers of parts will be there and quite capable of making the components. Maybe new entrants will decide to abandon the entrenched auto industry and do it themselves. Silicon Valley will drive a mighty hard bargain with legacy car makers. For years, lots of products from frigates to fridges have been viewed as purely a hardware platform into which electronics and software is integrated. For consumers, it is software and electronics that so often defines the product. Even more so with driverless capabilities.

Tesla has certainly torn up some of the auto industry cherished business model. Some entrenched car makers will find a way of working with Silicon Valley but some just won’t “get it.” A daring few have already covered both bases. Daimler Benz bought a stake in Tesla at a very early stage before surprisingly selling it this month. Strange, but there again, Tesla are giving access to their patents. There may be method in the madness !

And what of hydraulics in vehicles? If current electric vehicles are anything to go by, we would not be too optimistic. Sorry, but electrical power is king, we fear. Quite a few technologies will not be coming to the driverless party, but Sarum Hydraulics will still do clever manual hydraulics for public service vehicles and mobile hydraulic systems. See what we do on www.sarum-hydraulics.co.uk