Progress on self-driving technology has been slower than many people expected just a few years ago. Google’s Waymo was aiming to launch a fully driverless taxi service by the end of 2018 but missed its deadline. GM’s Cruise abandoned plans to launch a commercial service in 2019. Tesla has repeatedly fallen short of Elon Musk’s optimistic timelines for delivering fully self-driving technology.
This isn’t a crisis for these companies. They have plenty of cash and can keep working on the problem as long as they need to. But it is a big challenge for some of their competitors: independent self-driving startups that rely on venture capital to stay afloat. As the timeline for self-driving technology has stretched out, fundraising has gotten more difficult.
“Given the amount of resources required to develop an autonomous vehicle, it never made sense to have dozens of companies doing the same thing,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Guidehouse Insights. “There was always going to be a shake-out.”
Last year a startup called Drive.ai was acquired by Apple days before it would have gone out of business. The self-driving truck startup Starsky announced in March that it was shutting down. Zoox, one of the best-funded self-driving startups, was acquired by Amazon last month for $1.2 billion. It was reportedly close to running out of money and was forced to sell at a fraction of its 2018 valuation of $3.2 billion.
Other self-driving startups have hung on. In recent weeks, I’ve talked to senior leaders at three self-driving startups—Aurora, Voyage, and May Mobility. Each said their company was in no immediate financial danger and was planning to bring fully self-driving technologies to market. But the reality is that no one knows how long it takes to create a fully driverless, commercially viable service. No one has done it yet. And that means independent self-driving startups are living on borrowed time.