The automobile is arguably one of the most important inventions of the past two centuries. Aside from the implementation of safety features like airbags and seatbelts, though, for a while there hadn’t been many radical or widespread adjustments made to their overall designs.
The industry has more than made up for that lapse in just the past couple of decades, introducing innovative designs such as electric engines, keyless ignition, connected vehicle systems and — perhaps most exciting of all — driverless cars.
Self-Driving Car Companies
- Motional
- Magna International
- AutoX
- Cruise
- Waymo
- Swift Navigation
- Embark Trucks
- CARMERA
- Zoox
- Nauto
Once considered a science fiction daydream, self-driving cars are now taking the streets of San Francisco, New York, Seattle and beyond. Built with the most powerful 3D imaging and AI out there, driverless vehicle developers aim to ensure that riders enjoy a hands-free experience without compromising on personal safety.
While their technologies haven’t been universally adopted yet, self-driving car companies have high ambitions. It’s been forecasted that by 2040, there will be over 33 million driverless vehicles on the road, and around 55 percent of small businesses expect that they’ll adopt self-driving car technologies in their operations within the next two decades.
There is still a lot of work and testing to be done to ensure driverless technologies are one hundred percent foolproof, but given that the industry was valued at $27 billion in 2021, you can be sure that driverless cars will be taking the roads by storm in the not too distant future.
These 25 self-driving car companies are ushering in the next generation of travel.
Self-Driving Car Companies to Know
Location: Santa Monica, California
Motional’s team is building a driverless system that prioritizes safety above all else. The company’s technology relies on LiDAR, camera and radar sensors working together to ensure failure is not an option, and Motional has teamed with top rideshare companies like Uber, Via and Lyft to make driverless taxiing a reality as soon as possible.
Location: San Francisco, California
Cruise combines self-driving vehicle technology with rideshare technology to provide riders with autonomous transportation options on demand — and equipped with clean engineering to reduce fuel emissions too. The company’s automotive products are integrated with robotics and AI technologies, and are subjected to intensive simulation tests before launching to ensure that they observe road rules and safety precautions as accurately as possible.
Location: Mountain View, California
Waymo builds a variety of autonomous vehicles designed to meet the mobility needs of drivers across the country, offering both commuter vehicles and self-driving trucks for use in both the personal and commercial spaces. Tracing their origins to research projects conducted by Google, Waymo today delivers tested and proven self-driving technologies designed to respond quickly and efficiently to environmental factors and user input.
Location: San Francisco, California
Uber is the world’s leading ride-hailing and ridesharing company, helping people across geographies get to the places they need to be in record time. The company has also occasionally stepped into the self-driving vehicle realm, teaming up with Toyota to explore new ways to bring self-driving technology to Uber’s network.
Location: Novi, Michigan
Magna International offers its MAX4 self-driving platform that can be adapted to any vehicle without changing the design of the car. It’s able to achieve seamless integration by putting cameras, radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensors in locations like vehicle bumpers. According to a press release, a 300 miles-test of a vehicle equipped with Magna International’s platform drove fully autonomously 92 percent of the time.
Location: Fully Remote
ABB produces a variety of technologies for self-driving cars, but they also produce products for other use cases including PLC automation, analytics measurement platforms, low voltage products, power electronics and much more. ABB’s many areas of expertise include industrial automation, robotics, and electrification, and their broad global footprint is maintained from offices in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and beyond.
Location: Fully Remote
Founded by Allstate, Arity utilizes breakthrough big data capabilities to identify traffic patterns for predicting and reducing risk in the transportation industry. The platform uses the data it collects to advise insurance, shared mobility and automotive companies on the best risk reduction practices, a crucial component of the self-driving equation.
Location: Foster City, California
Zoox is staking their claim in both the autonomous vehicle market and on-demand mobility, developing vehicles that can drive on both city streets and freeways while maintaining the safety of their passengers. Their end goal is to create a fleet of independently operating cars that can serve cities as an on-demand transportation option.
Location: San Jose, California
AutoX is building an autonomous transportation system for moving people and goods across the most challenging roads in China. The company’s self-driving platform is capable of operating vehicles of multiple sizes and is currently operating in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Wuhan and Wuhu, as well as in Silicon Valley.
Location: Watertown, Massachusetts
WiTricity is a developer of wireless charging stations for cars, making it simpler for people to obtain and make use of electric vehicles without worry. The company’s magnetic resonance technology allows users to simply park within a WiTricity designated parking spot and begin charging immediately, paving the way for self-driving fleets to be deployed more efficiently over wider distances.
Location: San Francisco, California
Unity develops 3D technology and VR visualization tools to help companies make streamlined physical navigation accessible to both people and devices. The company works within the automotive industry to enhance operations with the help of 3D interfaces, with projects ranging from interactive VR that helps automotive makers test new tech before taking it on the road to machine learning training technology that will allow self-driving cars to become more instinctual.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Tesla’s Autopilot AI software uses a deep learning neural network to provide automatic steering and smart parking. The software is assisted by advanced cameras and sensors that range in visibility distance from 50 to 250 meters. Although Tesla is continuing to work on making fully autonomous cars, they expect to develop cars capable of both short and long-distance driving with no action required by people.
Location: Mountain View, California
Aurora’s Aurora Driver software can adapt to a variety of vehicles to allow for autonomous driving. The platform is powered by sensors that perceive the environment, software that maps safe routes and a computer that integrates these features into a vehicle. The company’s Aurora Horizon service, which is still in development, would potentially provide lower costs and better fuel efficiency for the trucking industry.
Location: San Francisco, California
Ouster is a creator of three-dimensional lidar sensor technology, helping auto builders set the autonomous revolution in motion by allowing machines to have better perception over their surroundings. The company’s sensors are utilized by renowned engineers who are moving the needle on robotics, autonomous vehicles, mapping technology, car security systems and other technologies necessary for creating a more widespread self-driving future.
Location: San Francisco, California
Swift Navigation’s engineers design and build precise positioning technologies for use in autonomous vehicles and other automotive use cases. Delivering solutions to companies in transportation, agriculture, robotics and other industries, Swift Navigation aids in the development of driverless transit technology by delivering GPS positioning products that are both accurate and scalable.
Location: San Francisco, California
Embark Trucks has a vision for the logistics industry: dispatch fleets of driverless trucks and shipping vehicles without needing to worry about their safety on the road. The company’s team maintains an equal focus on efficiency and safety, building autonomous trucks that can predict dangers on the road and protect their cargo on its way to its final destination.
Location: New York City, New York
CARMERA develops powerful HD mapping technology for use in self-driving vehicles, making it possible for automotive technologies to predict their surroundings and respond to external factors in real time. Their spatial AI technology is updated constantly to reflect up-to-date detours and road conditions, and their mapping covers a number of American cities including New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Detroit, as well as international locations like London and Tokyo.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Nauto leverages the power of AI to both develop their own driverless cars and provide other companies in the industry with the technologies to optimize their own vehicles. Among the offerings in their product suite are a fleet safety platform, driver behavior tracking alerts, built-in incident reporting and predictive collision alerting systems.
Location: Sunnyvale, California
CloudMade produces both automobile personalization technology and smart AI technologies, building vehicle systems that are tailored to each driver’s needs and help make the driving experience easier. Their technologies are designed to optimize driving range, cabin experiences, route guidance, communications between vehicles and environment prediction, and can also connect cars to mobile apps to manage settings from devices.
Location: Bellevue, Washington
Lumotive’s primary focus is on developing the most effective lidar system possible so that driverless vehicles can accurately predict and respond to incidents on the road without external input. Their high performance environmental scanning tech is integrated with beam steering systems so that AI perceptions can be communicated to vehicle infrastructures and adjust routes in real time.
Location: Seattle, Washington
SEEVA’s team anticipates that, while lidar and 3D sensing technology might be optimized to respond effectively to environmental changes, there are still factors like temperature changes and other obstructions that can detract from their responsiveness. Their technology is built to reduce these deterrents to lidar scanning, and are integrated with thermal adjustment and cleaning technologies to keep the line of vision clear.
Location: Columbia, Maryland
Reality AI crafts cloud-based environmental detection technologies, built to be flexibly integrated into pre-existing systems and platforms. Reality AI’s innovations have been recognized for awards and accolades by tech institutions like Design News, Project Kairos and Best of Sensors.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
HAAS Alert has a vision for self-driving technology as a means of heightening the services of emergency vehicles, providing autonomous cars and other transportation methods built to respond to external safety alerts and route the quickest paths to their destinations. Their patented Safety Cloud communicates road safety data to and from their networks, helping first responders get to the incidents on time without compromising safety.
Founded: 2018
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
NODAR creates 3D peripheral sensors for driverless vehicles that are built for long-distance perception and are integrated with self-calibrating software to help guide their vehicles to destinations in one piece. While designed primarily for automotive use, NODAR's proprietary technology can also be implemented in the logistics industry, as well as agriculture, aerospace, construction and other sectors.
Location: Fremont, California
Pony.AI uses a combination of deep and machine learning for its autonomous driving planning and control software. Its hardware uses lidar and radar sensors to determine the speed and location of other vehicles on the road. In 2022, the company received permits to operate its robotaxi services in Beijing.