The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future

The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future is Evangelos Simoudis’s 2017 book on autonomous vehicles, big data, and the wider transportation transformation that the convergence of these technologies has been producing. Simoudis is a venture capitalist, technology executive, and writer whose work focuses on the practical business and economic implications of the various data and artificial intelligence technologies that have been reshaping multiple industries.

The book takes up the central question of what the autonomous vehicle revolution actually means for the wider economy, for individual industries, and for the various participants in the transportation ecosystem. Rather than focusing primarily on the technical engineering of self driving cars, which has been the subject of many other books and articles in the autonomous vehicle space, Simoudis focuses on the data and business implications. The vast amounts of data that autonomous vehicles will generate, the new business models that will become possible once the data is available, the disruption to existing industries that the new business models will produce, and the wider economic and policy implications of the transformation.

Simoudis draws on his experience as a venture capitalist who has been investing in the autonomous vehicle and related technology spaces, on his interviews with executives and researchers in the industry, and on the wider business literature on technology disruption to develop his treatment of the subject. The book is aimed at business readers, policy makers, and general readers interested in understanding what the autonomous vehicle transition will actually look like as it unfolds across the next decade or two.

The book was written at a particular moment in the autonomous vehicle industry, when the early enthusiasm of the mid 2010s had not yet been tempered by the recognition that full autonomous driving would be considerably more difficult to achieve than many of the early projections had suggested. The intervening years have seen substantial changes in the autonomous vehicle industry, with various companies that the book discusses having gone through significant transitions and with the wider expected timeline for autonomous vehicle deployment having extended in ways that the original projections did not anticipate. Readers approaching the book today should be aware of this wider context and should treat the specific predictions and expectations the book contains as historical artifacts of a particular moment in the industry.

The foundational analysis of how data drives the autonomous vehicle business model and how the technology will reshape the wider transportation industry remains valuable. For business readers interested in the autonomous vehicle space, in the wider technology disruption literature, or in the practical economics of how new technologies transform existing industries, The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future is a useful read.