Why Automakers Won’t Be Sharing Their Self-Driving Car Tech With Each Other

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

There are some insisting that the automakers of self-driving cars ought to share openly with each other and freely reveal their proprietary wares, doing so to enable heightened progress in achieving true self-driving cars.

This sharing activity would presumably aid in ultimately obviating the 40,000 car crash related deaths each year in the United States alone and an estimated 1.3 million or more fatalities that occur worldwide annually via car accidents. The sooner autonomous cars are put onto our roads, the sooner it is said that we will start saving precious lives and reducing car crash induced injuries.

In a kind of presumed kumbaya moment, akin to at wartime having everyone suddenly lay down their arms, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the automakers and self-driving tech firms would divulge everything that they know and are arduously doing toward creating a self-driving car, and then the resulting synergy of this massive “open source” approach might speed-up the process?