April 26, 2019—Autonomous driving is costing exorbitant sums and, according to the "ADAS and Autonomous Driving Industry Chain Report 2018-2019 - OEMs", those who spend for it will often face long-term losses.
Barriers to autonomous driving are rising, according to the report. WAYMO that has spent over a decade and billions of dollars on the technology, has slowed its pace of commercialization even if being far ahead of its rivals, and has admitted that fully automated driving will take time.
OEMs are also racing to invest more in recruiting software engineers.
"Software will account for 90 percent of future innovations in the car. Today, our 20,000 developers are 90 percent hardware-oriented. That will change radically by 2030. Software will account for half of our development costs", says Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen.