Google is preparing a ride-hailing service based on its driverless car, according to a Bloomberg News report. At the same time, Uber said it's plunging into developing autonomous vehicles and mapping technology with new partner Carnegie Mellon University.
Until now, the Mountain View search giant and the San Francisco ride-hailing service have been frequent collaborators. In 2013, Google Ventures, the company's investment arm, put $258 million behind what is now the world's most valuable startup. Uber's app relies heavily on Google Maps. And Google's chief legal officer sits on Uber's board (a position Uber may be rethinking, according to Bloomberg).
"What appeared to be a very powerful symbiotic relationship may be developing into competition," said Susan Shaheen, co-director of UC Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center. "They're both trying not to be outmaneuvered."
While Uber has the lead in e-hailed rides, it's far too soon to say who might dominate. "Google's brand recognition is significant and evokes trust," she said.
"Google could create what I'd call 'Goober,' a competitor to Uber that would work even better," said Sam Hamadeh, CEO of PrivCo, which researches private companies and counts Google's investment arm as a client. Google's dominance of Internet advertising and search; its raft of products for mapping, travel, mobile payments and last-mile delivery, not to mention its multibillions in the bank, could add up to a powerhouse high-tech ride service, he said.
Uber declined to comment. Google said its response was encapsulated in a tweet. "We think you'll find Uber and Lyft work quite well," it read. "We use them all the time."
Slow down on the predictions, said some experts.
"It's not a head-to-head competition," said Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo. "While robotic cars are coming quickly, ones that can take passengers absolutely everywhere are much further off." Instead, first-generation driverless cars, likely by 2020, will be low-speed vehicles limited to controlled public spaces -- airports, shopping malls, corporate and college campuses, pedestrian-only downtowns and Disneyland, for instance.
"Robust robotic vehicles that can play in traffic alongside cars driven by ordinary people may come by 2030 if there's a miracle," Saffo said. The barriers aren't so much technology but broader societal agreement.
New York University finance Professor Aswath Damodaran said the entire brouhaha centers on a fantasy.
"What we have is two companies supposedly fighting over a market that does not even exist," he wrote in an e-mail.
He's even more dubious about whether robotic cars will ever go mainstream. "After the Google Glass fiasco, I am not sure that a geek-designed driverless car would ever be used by anyone other than a geek," he wrote.
Jeremy Rifkin, an economic and social theorist, said it makes sense that both Google and Uber want to control three crucial economic activities: communication, energy, and transportation and logistics.
"If you can dominate all three of those essential platforms, you are in an enviable position," he said. "However I don't think either Google or Uber will succeed."
Instead, Rifkin pointed to theories he espoused in a 2014 book, "The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons and the Eclipse of Capitalism," that the broadly distributed Internet of Things technology will allow consumer cooperatives to overtake corporate monopolies.
Hamadeh said Google needs to find new ways to fuel expansive growth, because its core search business will grow only to the extent that Internet use increases. The company has already followed a pattern of cozying up to interesting ventures and later competing with them, he said. Before introducing its Android smartphones, Google's Eric Schmidt served on Apple's board while it revolutionized the industry with the iPhone.
Google's more-direct competitor for logistics is Amazon, with both companies avidly pursuing same-day last-mile deliveries of goods. But when it comes to robotic taxis, there's yet another contestant.
"The dark horse in the robotic-car race is Tesla," Saffo said. "They've got the perfect platform. If they teamed up with Google, things could move quickly."
––––
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
———
©2015 San Francisco Chronicle
