Who’s Ahead in the Automated-Driving Race?

The 2018 Navigant Research Leaderboard study brings new insights into the industry’s progress.

March 1, 2018

Sam Abuelsamid

GM and Waymo top the 2018 Navigant Research Automated Driving Leaderboard. (Credit: Navigant Research)

A decade after the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles concluded, the world continues to inch closer to a new era where mere humans no longer manually control vehicles. In fact, as automated vehicle technologies continue to mature, companies are now as focused on the next-generation business model as the core technology.

The companies that figure out both sides of that puzzle are the ones most likely to survive and thrive in the 2020s and beyond. It is this dynamic that the Navigant Research Automated Driving Leaderboard tracks.

Navigant Research covers a range of technologies related to energy production, distribution and use. Included are those in the transportation sector such as electrification, connectivity, services and automated driving. Most of the company’s reports examine the technologies and forecast future market adoption. However, Leaderboard Reports provide a snapshot of the top companies in a sector and examine their progress against each other. The reports study 10 to 20 companies and score them on a range of criteria relative to each other.

The 2018 edition of the Automated Driving Leaderboard examined 19 companies and partnerships that are focused on developing full-stack automated driving solutions. These include software and hardware suites, vehicle integration, production and deployment. The intent is to gauge which companies are best prepared and most likely to achieve successful commercial deployment of highly automated driving systems in the coming years. Such systems would be classified as Level 4 or 5, according to the SAE J3016 standard.

Sensing, computing and software technologies have reached a stage where a small team armed with $100,000 in seed funding, a donor vehicle, an Nvidia Drive PX computer, some software frameworks and off-the-shelf sensors, can quickly put together a passable demonstrator. However, there’s an enormous crevasse between running local demos in a mule and having a truly viable, robust product that can safely transport regular people, anywhere.

The ability to traverse that gap is what the Navigant Leaderboard tries to gauge.

The companies that rank highest in the Navigant Leaderboard are those that are closing the gaps in their full-stack solutions. They’re doing it by building in-house, forming partnerships, or making strategic investments and acquisitions. For the first time, non-traditional automotive players were included in the 2017 rankings with companies such as Waymo and nuTonomy joining the likes of Ford, General Motors and Daimler.

As the industry continued to realign itself throughout 2017 and into the early days of 2018, some names from last year’s ranking disappeared while others joined for the first time. The world’s most valuable company, Apple, was added as it finally began testing its systems on public roads. Meanwhile a tiny French company called Navya also got a score as it has continued to expand its global presence with pilot deployments of autonomous low-speed shuttles in Asia, North America and Europe.

GM, which partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to win the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, has been working on automated driving for decades. The automaker was among the leading group in each of the previous Leaderboards and has moved clearly to the head of the pack. Its progress has been driven by its 2016 acquisition of Cruise Automation, its development and validation efforts with the automated version of the Chevrolet Bolt, and its production capabilities.

The company’s vast dealer network can be leveraged to service the vehicles and its mobility service unit Maven is developing new business models. Just days before Navigant’s report was published, GM unveiled a version of the Bolt without a steering wheel or pedals that it plans to deploy in 2019.

Meanwhile Waymo moved up from seventh in the 2017 study, to second, as it launched pilot automated ride-hailing programs, added Lyft as a partner and formed relationships with Avis and AutoNation to service its vehicles. While Waymo’s automated technology has long been regarded as among the best in the business, it has no manufacturing capability. But even that is being addressed with an expanded agreement with Fiat Chrysler to supply a fleet of Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

Conversely Tesla, which many observers consider a leader — based on the hype generated by CEO Elon Musk for its AutoPilot driver assist system — continues to struggle. The 15-year-old electric vehicle maker has yet to reach profitability and is grappling with high-volume production of its more affordable Model 3. Meanwhile, version 2 of AutoPilot has yet to reach parity with the original version that was developed with Mobileye vision technology.

While limited early commercial deployments of automated mobility services will be launching by 2019, the number of automated vehicles isn’t expected to hit the millions of vehicles annually until the mid-2020s. Between now and then, alliances and ownership in this sector will continue to shift — and with them the brands considered to be leaders in this field.

Sam Abuelsamid is a senior research analyst contributing to Navigant Research’s Transportation Efficiencies program, where he leads the Mobility research service. His career has included stints as a development engineer at Tier 1s, focusing on advanced electronic control systems, embedded software and architecture. Abuelsamid is a monthly columnist in SAE’s Automotive Engineering magazine and regularly contributes to Forbes.