At CES, a mad dash to nowhere

LAS VEGAS — Up and down all eight lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard last week, the bright lights of this town turned to automotive innovation as the hottest ticket on The Strip.

There were auto companies espousing civic duties and envisioning smarter cities. There were fuel cell concepts with more range and instrumentation systems with more graphics.

And then there was Aptiv, Delphi's new tech spinoff, partnering with Lyft to showcase the latest in autonomous transportation, delivered in real time under real-world conditions and really wet weather.

Impatient, drenched riders formed lines that wound around long city blocks as they waited to take a test ride in an autonomous Lyft. The hottest ticket in town. Pure Vegas magic.

Only no one rode more than an inch an hour.

In a city that seems to double in population each January, the tech heads mashed with the auto world which bumped into the 4K TV geeks — all creating traffic congestion so bad that auto was a four-letter word.

CES 2018: The world's largest parking lot for autonomous rides, which prompted a retreat to the oldest form of transportation technology — your own two feet.

How ironic.

And how appropriate. Forced foot travel was a perfect metaphor for an auto industry trying to move so quickly to distance itself from its traditional past that everyone is going in the same direction — but nowhere fast.

Walk the halls and every supplier and car company has the latest innovation, usually for use in limited places, but intended to be used by everyone, and capable of solving all problems in a yet-to-be-developed city of the future.

Each has a groundbreaking solution, new partnership or newly funded venture.

And, by the way, my lidar is better than your lidar.

The ecosystem needs a good flush.

Last week, auto strategists at PwC published a concise but extremely thoughtful piece titled "How to Overcome Five Myths that are Distracting Your Auto Company."

It should have been dropped from drones at CES.

As PwC tells it — and CES proves — the industry may have let the autonomous car take the wheel a little too quickly, particularly when it comes to the me-too need to produce solutions immediately.

It's true that huge upheavals in automotive technology, both existing and predicted, "have created a deep well of uncertainty." Many companies are pouring money into new and unproven technologies only because they are unsure where to turn, PwC says.

"The riskiness of this approach," PwC says, "is glaring when you consider the industry's record of unimpressive value creation."

The industry has oversubscribed to the potential difficulties and overproduced possible solutions.

Nowhere was that more evident than at CES, where booth after booth offered the same solutions, just with a different brand.

How many of the world's largest auto suppliers can partner with global providers of mobility solutions for public transportation to launch a unique new platform for autonomous mass transit fleets?

Sound familiar?

How many platforms can exist? How many new systems can be leveraged to provide complete end-to-end apps — particularly when one doesn't know where the end is or which app is up?

The truth is that everyone is in a race to the great answer — and inevitably there will be some winners and many losers. Added to that, progress is difficult to measure because the length of the field is unknown. Some, like General Motors, are making enormous strides in introducing AV technology, as evidenced by news last week that the automaker plans to launch public ride-hailing services with self-driving vehicles that don't have manual controls such as steering wheels and pedals, starting in 2019.

Change is coming. Major change. And facing those uncertainties, many are protecting their companies by making bets that may satisfy the market but are divorced from reality, as PwC so correctly says.

And a dose of reality: Electric vehicles are a good decade away. Mass AVs are further away. Shared mobility is more headlines than reality today. Silicon Valley can't mass produce a vehicle yet and doesn't want to. And an auto slowdown is on the way, which will damage the revenue goals of, what PwC calls, "downstream integration."

And not everything is plug and play.

As a final example, software companies and tech startups are designing plug-and-play autonomous solutions that automakers can't really integrate seamlessly. But talk to executives at GM and they'll tell you that 40 percent of their AV solutions are newly developed from the outside; more than half are completely integrated within the company.

Try working plug-and-play AV into that environment.

Finally, I subscribe to what the piece suggests for those companies in the me-too space: Focus your strategy on what you know well; stay on the right path and slowly build to the future, protecting who you are and how you operate; figure out where you fit in a new, realistic world; manage costs; manage talent for the future; and don't do it all yourself.

Maybe it will be best for more auto companies to come together quickly, in the way partnerships were formed on powertrain solutions when fuel-economy regulations were tightening.

Perhaps it is unrealistic.

But similar companies working on the same systems is creating a duplicity that can't be called progress.

Less than a decade ago, the biggest automotive game-changer at CES was a CD changer.

Obviously, the stakes have been raised thanks to innovation, technology and advancements no one could have imagined the day Sync and Ford partnered together here.

But, a decade later, the path has more congestion than one could imagine.

Just look at the Vegas Strip.