At Google's self driving project, ambitious full autonomy goal means slow progress, frustration, as rivals like Uber, Tesla debut autonomous services, features
Alistair Barr / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's 2016 report captures the fork in the road for Google's car project: it had already been reported as building its own Uber competitor alongside the driverless effort, yet the full-autonomy-first strategy meant shipping nothing while Uber and Tesla put autonomous services and features in front of customers. The frustration Bloomberg documents inside the project proved durable — five years later, sources described execs at what became Waymo feeling the same way about sluggish progress, following a mass exodus of top talent.
First-order effects
- Google's project cedes the commercial lead to Uber and Tesla, who debut services and features while Google holds out for full autonomy — trading market presence for technical purity.
- Internal morale takes the hit directly: the frustration Bloomberg reports becomes a recruiting liability for a team whose timeline keeps slipping.
Second-order effects
- Tesla's rival path — shipping partial autonomy and, per later coverage, using customers as unpaid safety drivers while shifting goalposts on full self-driving — forces the industry into a visible trade-off between deployment speed and safety rigor.
- The gap between promises and delivery eventually draws an estimated ~$100B of investor capital into self-driving startups with little progress to show, pressuring every player to justify timelines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the autonomy industry consolidates around two durable camps — incremental driver-assist shipped now versus full autonomy promised later — with even big players like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo logging a disappointing year when the full-autonomy camp underdelivers.
- Tesla's imitation-learning route still faces expert skepticism that required AI breakthroughs may not arrive soon, suggesting the structural divide between approaches persists well beyond this 2016 snapshot.
The trend: Autonomous driving is splitting into a race between companies that ship partial autonomy immediately and those holding out for full autonomy, with the latter's timeline slipping across a decade of coverage.