Fresh off recovering from a deep recession, the automotive industry was poised for yet another major upheaval as companies like Uber and Lyft entered the fray with the intention of ending personal car ownership. Add autonomous vehicles to the mix and a growing faction of people predicted we were nearing the beginning of the end for many of these car makers.
Click around the complex web of relationships as Detroit and Silicon Valley try to reinvent the car
It’s early days, and it’s already complicated.
But those auto companies that many criticized for moving too slowly have spent the past few years drumming up partnerships and other forms of relationships with the very players that were perceived to be the bane of the industry.
Volvo and Daimler have struck self-driving relationships with Uber and Toyota has invested in the ride-hail player. Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata Motors, is working with Lyft, which in turn has partnerships with Alphabet’s self-driving arm Waymo as well as General Motors.
We’re still in the very beginning stages of the evolution of this nascent industry, but already the web of automaker, mobility and self-driving tech companies is increasingly intertwined and complicated.
You can click around the chart to see which automakers already have dance partners.
Part of the auto industry’s scurry to ramp up its autonomous efforts is certainly to secure the future of its business. But the other part is because the hype around the autonomous tech industry paired with investor interest made catching up in the race to self-driving just as much about its current health. Look no further than Ford’s recent ousting of its CEO Mark Fields for being too slow on innovation.
At a high level, the self-driving ecosystem consists of three parts: The car, the autonomous tech and the mobility or commercialization of the car. It’s still a matter of debate, but many industry experts believe consumers won’t be buying their own self-driving car and will be accessing them through on-demand networks like Uber and Lyft.
There are a number of other players in the self-driving ecosystem that plan to own a segment of the tech stack, but for our purposes we’ve mapped out the many relationships automakers have with either mobility companies or self-driving tech companies that at least have ambitions to develop the full brain of the driverless car.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
