The importance of autonomous driving technology for tech giants

The importance of autonomous driving technology for non-automobile industry companies e.g., Google, Uber, Baidu, Apple, Alibaba and even Dyson probably can be summed up as below:-

i) The high potential of autonomous vehicle to offer affordable portable home office/on-demand temporary office and even living room in the future.

ii) The technology ecosystem surrounding autonomous driving platform, e.g., voice-controlled smart speakers/digital assistants, virtual augmented reality, Internet of Things, GPS navigation, E-Commerce smart delivery, online streaming entertainment services, Smart Glasses, Smart Watches.

iii) Autonomous vehicles could offer temporary storage for the excess electricity generated by the next generation electric power house. The car owner basically can lend their cars to power generators for additional income: charge with (absorb) excess electricity in the morning and discharge the electricity back to the power grid at night or whenever it is needed.

iv) The car owner could pay the car loan via their earnings from ride hailing services powered by autonomous vehicles.

v) As Alexa and Google Home become more and more prominent, most of the online search are now input via voice command and ditching away traditional desktop keyboard search and the currently popular mobile device touch screen search. Imagine in the future, the search will be done via your Google Glass or Smart Assistant in your autonomous driving cars. [Google has been giving away "free" Android OS to the market to solidify its dominance in online advertisement and search engine business on smart mobile devices; besides paying expensive annual royalty to Mozilla Foundation to make google as the default search engine on Firefox browser. Google definitely would want to become the default search engine on any autonomous driving platform too.]

vi) Autonomous driving technology is one of the best use cases for unleashing the potential of AI (especially deep learning).

vii) To gain the first-mover advantage which would enable their implementations to become the de facto industry standard.

Reference:
[1] http://www.thedrive.com/tech/17620/nissan-will-test-remote-electric-car-charging?iid=sr-link1
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/7e75b7d2-169c-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e
[3] http://www.alphr.com/energy/1009104/ovo-electric-car-vehicle-to-grid-vcharge
[4] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/breakthrough/how-google-intends-to-dominate-with-its-android-plan/article12049439/
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pays-to-put-search-engine-back-on-firefox-browser-in-u-s
[6] https://www.businessweekly.com.tw/article.aspx?id=2656&type=Blog&p=0
[7] https://www.wsj.com/video/business-leaders-predict-the-future-of-self-driving-cars/F49DE619-BABD-4FD3-9797-FF91A0947DAD.html
[8] http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2141954/alibaba-confirms-self-driving-car-tests-joining-baidu-and-tencent
[9] https://www.wired.com/story/in-building-an-electric-car-dyson-goes-its-own-way/
[10] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/14/apple-expands-self-driving-car-fleet/
[11] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-12-21/kai-fu-lee-bloomberg-studio-1-0-full-show-video
[12] http://blog.ycombinator.com/baidus-coo-qi-lu-discusses-ai-with-daniel-gross/