Automakers Race to Get Ahead of Silicon Valley on Car-Sharing https://t.co/8iWcFVQLIc

— USABloggen (@USABloggen) June 8, 2017

Kapplöpningen om vem som ska bli först med en allmänt användbar förarlös bil bara ökar. Blir det Silicon Valley-företag som Uber, Google, Tesla eller ett traditionellt bilföretag?

Nick Wingfield skriver i New York Times: Automakers Race to Get Ahead of Silicon Valley on Car-Sharing

On a recent overcast afternoon in this city’s Belltown neighborhood, a driver pulled up in a gleaming new BMW X1 sport utility vehicle just a few minutes after a few swipes of a smartphone app had summoned it.

This was not a car dispatched by Uber or Lyft, the two tech companies that are the Coke and Pepsi of ride-sharing services. Instead, the vehicle belonged to the company that made it, BMW Group, through a service it owns called ReachNow.

The ride-sharing service represents the latest effort by a car manufacturer to get a grip on the technological trends that could disrupt their businesses by making vehicle ownership — and eventually even drivers — unnecessary. BMW and Daimler, maker of Mercedes-Benz, are two of the most aggressive carmakers building their own “mobility services” to prevent Silicon Valley’s upstarts from keeping all the spoils themselves.

Det rör sig om gigantiska belopp men också i slutändan om den amerikanska modellen där varje enskild innevånare ska ha sin egen bil kosta vad det kosta vill, mot den europeiska modellen med kollektivtrafik. Och givetvis också m miljoner och åter miljoner människoliv.