It would be different if they already had an attractive car on the road, but they haven't. Just look at how much time and money it takes for Tesla to create a profitable vehicle for the masses. The R&D costs for autonomous driving are small in comparison.
If comma.ai can (sort of) create an autonomous vehicle with just a couple of employees and Tesla can go fully autonomous with a sensor suite that's 5% of the cost of Google's, how much money is there to be made for Apple and Google? Even if the quality of their self-driving setup is 10x better, they will have a hard time selling it.
The technology Google uses is about to become way cheaper. I may be wrong, but from what I've read about the development of LIDAR systems, I estimate the prices will drop in the next few years. I think we're at a similar point where we were a couple of years ago with accelerometers and gyros, before MEMS became commonplace.
Even if I am wrong and the tech breakthrough will not happen, I think the economies of scale that kick in for the large-spread usage of Google's approach would make it competitive enough.
I, personally, believe that Tesla's approach for full autonomy is insufficient.
There are other companies out there having functionality on par with Tesla, on cars, on the road. Google's capabilities are superior in almost every way. Not yet commercial, but if it gets there(very likely), it'll be a bet that pays off. They have a ton of training data and experience in the field.
All the more, I think Tesla's functionality will not lead to Level 4 autonomy within the next decade because fo a false-start approach.
A company like Google has the scale and experience to create a regulatory landscape in which a car even 10% less safe will be forbidden on public roads. They might even look good doing it.
As geohot discovered, cars are sold to consumers only after they are sold to regulators. Tesla understands this, but if someone else builds a safer car, incumbents' experience may be rendered academic.
The problem with this scenario is that modern cars are already safe enough that it will literally take decades to gather enough data to prove a statistically significant 10% safety increase from autonomous cars, even if you sell millions of them.
Keep in mind the NHTSA safety statistics you frequently see quoted are for the entire car population on the road, with a significant portion of 10-15 year old cars which are less safe than new cars. Even 25 year old cars without crumple zones and airbags is something you see on the road every single day.
Those have to do with fatality rates, not accident rates(1 accident per 250,000 miles).
>> statistically significant 10% safety increase
For a sample size of a million cars , each year is 15 Billion miles, i.e. 60,000 accidents per year, vs 54000 accidents per year is statistcally significant.
Fatality rates are what's recently been discussed, e.g. related to the Tesla AutoPilot crash.
If you switch to measuring "accidents", two big concerns pop up: 1) who defines what an accident is? and 2) if we get autonomous cars that end up in less minor accidents but same or more number of fatalities, is it really worth it?
We could extend it to "fatalities and accidents where someone is left permanently disabled", which is pretty unambiguous and does measure the most important factors. But I'm afraid (or rather, glad) that this won't give you an orders-of-magnitude increase in statistical samples as you get when counting all accidents.
I'd imagine it would be incredibly difficult to get that kind of regulation without all the other existing manufacturers having the same incentives to support it.
If comma.ai can (sort of) create an autonomous vehicle with just a couple of employees and Tesla can go fully autonomous with a sensor suite that's 5% of the cost of Google's, how much money is there to be made for Apple and Google? Even if the quality of their self-driving setup is 10x better, they will have a hard time selling it.