The testing and manufacturing of autonomous vehicles has become very popular among car makers recently. An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle equipt with self driving technology allowing its passengers to sit back and relax while it does all of the work. To get an idea of how quickly the idea is becoming popular look at laser range finder producing company Velodyne Acoustics Inc. Velodyne is the worlds biggest supplier of laser sensors used in autonomous vehicles. The company announced that it is expecting to double in sales from 2000 units in 2015 to 4000 come 2016. Velodyne also said that it is working with 17 automakers to deliver a more marketable inexpesive version of its original 64 beam spinning laser which is deemed too large and expensive to be used commonly in mass production.
This correlates with our marketing class because this is a new product to the market place. By creating a new product which is very versatile consumers and competitors alike will engage it into the marketing mix. Sub products such as this which are a part of something much bigger such as autonomus driving in the future are what keep our markets going.
Great article! It is going to be interesting to see how the technological environment transition into this robotic world. The autonomous vehicles will make the world more efficient, the business operations will be less expensive and most likely more effective. Amazon has even announced that they want drones to be delivering their packages. In this overpopulated world, what will happen to the people being replaced by the machines, will this really benefit the world or create chaos?
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see these cars in action. However, it would seem like the cars would eliminate the need for taxi and uber driver. Autonomous cars would basically do to them similarly to what Netflix did to blockbuster.
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