Christopher Columbus And Evaluating Autonomous Vehicles As An Investor

In recent times, the news surrounding Autonomous Vehicles has been quite active. Examples include Amazon
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acquiring Zoox for over a billion dollars, Mercedes and BMW joining forces to develop AV technology, Mercedes and BMW breaking up, Mercedes choosing another partner with Nvidia
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,  VW and Ford partnering to invest in Argo and many more. The situation is often described as a race.  Waymo was well ahead, but now everyone has caught up.  Mercedes is well behind and is now desperate to catch up. There is even quantification in the form of investment levels to make it all official. The race paradigm certainly provides drama and urgency.  However, is it really the right paradigm ?

A race brings to mind a well organized and structured event with a common scarce objective for all participants. There is one (or three medals) winner and the rest are losers. This does not seem to match the current situation. Instead of a race, perhaps the better mental paradigm is exploration. Specifically, a mental paradigm which matches more the great ocean explorations of people such as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. In this world, all of these groups are actually funding a voyage. Why might this be a better mental paradigm ?

There are at least five interesting connections between these two disparate worlds: 

1. Goals:  In the age of explorers,  the goal was to find a sea path to the riches in India and the southeast. In the AV world, the common goal is to enable automation for purposes of safety and access. In both cases, while the goals were common, the method of achieving them was open and involved a great deal of risk.
2. Vast Unknown:  In the age of explorers, the oceans were the vast unknown. The size and depth was not understood.  In the age of autonomous vehicles, the core problems to solve the problems of perception and decision making are the vast unknown.  
3. Time and Space:  In navigating this vast unknown, the scale of time and space are challenged in both dimensions. Explorers sometimes go in circles and almost never know enough to take the direct line to the goal. In this world, investment in time or resources does not matter too much because direction is often unclear. 
4. Accidental Discoveries:  Columbus discovered America while his goal was getting to India. In the AV paradigm, we should expect that AV technologies may discover uses in markets which might be much more valuable. Who knows, maybe they might accidentally solve sustainable agriculture, space exploration, or ocean construction.
5. Native discoveries: On a more humorous note, the native Americans tribes were surely surprised to be “discovered.”  Similarly, the traditional automotive tribes (the natives in this case) have a similar surprise to be discovered by the high technology tribes. 

Why is this important ?  After all, why does it matter if one characterizes something as a race or an exploration of a vast space?  If you are an investor, it is important to discern the difference and understand the risks as well as timescales involved.  If you believe in the race paradigm, Waymo should already have won, and perhaps now, you believe that Amazon has already won. If you believe in the exploration paradigm,  all of this activity is froth which perhaps does not mean very much. In the exploration paradigm, you are carefully looking for the folks who actually manage to bring back the tobacco plant(real results).  Of course, Columbus likely never saw the jet above called Zoom, so that is also something to keep in mind as well.