I don't think any major automaker has an in house effort anywhere close to Google. Most of them rely on suppliers like Bosch for their driverless car tech.
I think this shows that Ford is the only automaker that currently understands the shifts that the industry is about to undergo. None of the automakers or their suppliers can act like a software company in comparison to Google.
I don't think it's the tech (as such) that matters so much. I think the attitude, approach, and discussion matter much more.
For instance: Google has said, for now, we can't have drivers in the loop and call it a self-driving car (see Tesla etc videos[1]). That makes a lot of sense, but its also very limiting.
Airbus et al have not figured this one out (Air France 447[2]) - Perhaps automotive scale will provide more effective tools for managing attention and skill.
There are so many difficult non-technical discussions to overcome in this market - liability, user tracking (location history and habits), information leakage, failure modes (should I honk and flash lights if my human doesn't take control), aggressiveness settings (if the car is not going fast enough, the user will take control back), and many more, I'm sure.
Technical issues are going to be easy compared to the human issues. I think Google is addressing this by having an explicitly limited approach for now.
1. http://www.cnet.com/news/this-is-the-stupidest-misuse-of-tes...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 - Junior pilot did not understand that he was in a stall, possibly due to very low actual controlled flying time.
- Liability: the CEO of Volvo says that the manufacturer is liable if the vehicle crashes in autonomous mode. That's probably the way this will work out. That's a good thing; it means the manufacturer has every incentive to avoid crashes. Manufacturers will insure against this and build that into the price.
- User tracking: OnStar has that now. The next question is whether Big Google will permit you to opt out. Urmson, Google's head of automatic driving, says they don't need car to car communication. It's better to use sensor data. Lots of things on the road won't be equipped to talk, anyway.
- Information leakage: what's the question? Security, or privacy?
- Failure modes: there needs to be enough backup capability to get the vehicle stopped without a collision after any single component failure, and enough fault detection to detect any single component failure. It's probably sufficient to have two forward-facing radars with a backup computer monitoring the second one, dual actuators for steering and brakes, and backup throttle cutoff. The other side of failure is driving into a situation that the system can't handle. But that's usually a problem that appears slowly, as with heavy rain or fog, rather than all at once.
- Aggressiveness settings: this hasn't been a big problem for Google, other than having to edge into intersections in some situations. Self-driving cars have an edge in that they can look in all directions simultaneously, which means they can merge more precisely instead of more aggressively.