The automobilist industry on the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Lyft is a private transport company, founded in San Francisco, based on a mobile application through which travelers and drivers can get in touch to take a trip. Just like Uber, Lyft is based on the collaborative economy and it doesn’t count on professional drivers or drivers with specific licenses. Why would a car manufacturer be interested in a company that puts private drivers and users in need of transport in contact? What is General Motors looking for in the Uber competition?

This GM investment on Lyft reflects the interest of the automobilist company to enter the market of transport-related services, in order to extend all its activity, surpassing its current role as vehicle manufacturers. Autonomous vehicles is a technology still on starter phase that is rapidly accelerating. Some governments are giving punctual permissions for their circulation, others are already examining their rules and there are remarkable proofs of long trips without drivers. Important multinationals of all kinds of sectors are investing big amounts of money, and promise to eliminate human error from the equation regarding accidents.

Regarding this, the Virginia Tech  University study ensures that autonomous cars show a much lower accident rate than automobiles driven by flesh and bone men.

Human drivers have an average of 4,2 accidents for every 1,6 millions of kilometers, while autonomous cars reduce this rate to a quarter. What’s curious is that, according to what’s been recorded, any of the accidents where an autonomous car was involved wasn’t caused by it.

The news about the evolution of cars without drivers are piling up. We already know that authorized tests are taking place in London on open roads, in Switzerland there are touristic populations that have on ‘beta’ buses that make circuits without drivers, in the United States there are some roads authorized for circulation of this type of vehicles, and in Spain, there are arguments taking place about how unnecessary it is to pass the “parking” test by those taking the test for a driving license for parking is something that can already be done without human intervention.

The most noticeable example is the one from the Japanese company Robot Taxi that has started testing a driverless taxi service for residents of Fujisawa with the goal of having these automatic driving vehicles operating on the Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020. A company worker remains on the pilot seat during the trajectory to analyze track changes and stops at traffic lights, while an automatic driving system does the rest of the operations.

Toyota Motor, Honda Motor and Nissan, are currently working to lead the market of autonomous cars. Last July Google started to test its own automatic driving systems in Texas and Uber experiences with driverless cars in Pittsburgh. This is going fast. The idea that driverless cars are something that will happen someday but that we won’t see them for decades to come is weaker and weaker every time. Exponential innovation and legislative adaptations are accelerating in a remarkable way.

Seen this way, the association between GM and Lyft seems almost logical. These are two companies that give something the other one needs. In the last years the personal transport market has quickly changed. The so called Millennial are betting for an evident change of habits caused by sharing, by use demand, by renting and by giving less and less value to properties.

GM knows that the need to possess a car is receding. And in fact, knowing that it has over a decade researching the technology of cars without drivers, what it needs is to adapt to a market that offers keys to what should and shouldn’t be done.

The key is not so much whether the vehicle is being driven by someone or going alone. The real social revolution linked to the technology is that it’s no longer a matter of not being the “driver”, the matter is that people stop being the “owners”.

Lyft gives GM an innovation space in the field of autonomous vehicles very important. It seems Lyft has already started externalizing developments to compete face to face with Uber at the same time that GM reaches the level of others such as Audi, Daimler or BMW. Besides, and going deeper on the idea of “no possession”, GM and Lyft have recently announced that they will offer “joint renting centers”, places in which they will allow Lyft drivers to rent cars in short term.

What does Lyft win apart from an important source of founding? The truth is that Lyft is focused on rivaling face to face with Uber. While it takes care of that it can’t do research or move forward on the subject of auto-driving. Contrary to its direct rival, Uber, that is moving towards that immediate scenario.

Last year Uber set in motion its own facilities in Pittsburgh for the development of cartography and technology for cars without drivers. In fact, Travis Kalanick, its CEO, said that ′the method with which Uber will be more competitive and cheap will go from substituting human drivers with robotic cars′. Let’s say that if the major Uber competitor, Lyft, wants to be at the same height it can’t set aside for one second this scenario and will have to spend a lot of money to be on the boiling point. With GM it clearly gains speed on this subject.

Currently Uber is worth approximately 62.500 million dollars even though it loses about 1.000 million per year. Something more than the total capitalization in the General Motors market. It seems logical that they all start positioning themselves and that they do it even by quitting to their own DNA. This is called renovation on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also called Industrial Revolution 4.0.

(En espa?ol aquí)