The Googlemobile, Google's famed self-driving car, has logged some 500,000 miles since 2009. Capturing 1.3 million bits of data per second along with video feeds and radar pulses, the car's computers can "see" the vehicles around it and keep clear of them. Nissan's CEO, Carlos Ghosn, predicted driverless cars will hit showrooms by 2020. The market for smart vehicle systems like lane-departure warnings and collision-avoidance will be around $22 billion by 2020, Ian Riches, director of the global automotive practice at London-based Strategy Analytics, told Forbes.
Meanwhile, Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric carmaker, is riding high. The company reported its first ever quarterly profit this month and saw its stock price shoot upwards of $97 per share—an all-time high. At more than $10 billion, the company's market value is now greater than that of established automakers Fiat and Mitsubishi Motors. And for icing on the cake, Tesla's first made-from-scratch car, the electric Model S sedan, has received a rare near-perfect score from Consumer Reports, according to National Geographic.
In the first three months of this year, Tesla reported $7 million in revenue from development services. Another $68 million, or roughly one in every eight dollars of revenue during the quarter, came from selling credits earned under California's zero emission vehicles (ZEV) program. About $17 million came from sales of "other regulatory credits." The company is preparing to take advantage of its popularity on Wall Street by raising an estimated $648 million by selling a combination of shares and debt-like securities, to be repaid in 2018.
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