• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, September 4, 2015

Um, so, remember how last week I was saying that Uber would be the main force driving (haha) the transition to autonomous vehicles?

I may have been wrong.

Not about Uber’s motivation to get autonomous vehicles on the road, though. Uber is, first and foremost, a technology company: its magic is in the app and the algorithm. The drivers are kind of incidental, and if they can be eliminated, it would allow Uber to deploy its technology even more efficiently and even more profitably.

So it’s not that its principals aren’t motivated. They are. And it’s not that they don’t have resources. They do. It’s just that there’s just the teensiest chance that they may get distracted—with China.

Over on Pando, (which really is well worth the subscription), Sarah Lacy describes China as “the closest Uber has ever come to an existential threat, and the only place it’s ever faced real competition,” going on to describe Uber China’s struggles with financing, national security, fraud, and a void of management.

Lacy makes a pretty compelling case. Even if China doesn’t prove to be Uber’s downfall, there are only so many massive, bet-the-farm plays one company can take on, even if that company has lots and lots (and lots) of cash.

At the same time, as traditional car companies wake up to the inevitability of self-driving vehicles, their motivation to get ahead of the curve goes from “gee it would be fun to play in this sexy niche market” to “OMG, if we don’t do this we’re out of business.”

And they’re making progress. At BMW, “the ultimate driving machine” may soon not need a driver. As The Detroit Bureau reports, “The Bavarian maker’s sixth-generation 7-Series sedan comes as close to hands-free driving as anything on the road, and company officials promise they’re ready to push things further if regulators give them the go…

“Like so many of its competitors, BMW is adding a variety of semi-autonomous features to the new 7-Series. The 2016 model will be capable of driving hands-free on the highway, though the maker will limit that to a maximum 15 seconds before requiring a driver puts hands back on the steering wheel. The system actually is capable of operating hands-free far longer, but BMW officials say they are currently limited by regulatory guidelines. They would revise that if the rules change. Current safety regulations, in fact, will bar a number of features offered on the European version of the 7-Series from coming to the U.S.” Those features include autonomous parking, either into a parking spot or into a garage.

In other words, BMW is currently more constrained by regulation than by technology. As is Google. As are, no doubt, many others frantically scrambling to capture the lead in the race to self-driving cars.

Which is why Uber may not win it after all. The more companies invested in autonomous vehicles, the greater the perception that they’re inevitable. The greater that perception, the more likely regulators are to take steps to accommodate them. The more regulators take steps to accommodate them, the greater the likelihood that we’ll all finally accept that humans are terrible drivers and we should just turn it all over to the robots. And the more we willing we become to turn it over to the robots, the greater the threat to any company that makes or relies on traditional, driverful vehicles.

Meaning everyone is just as hungry as everyone else, and—despite what I said last week--we still have no idea who will win.

Stay tuned.