This revision updates the original working paper with new material on the UNECE ADS regulation, the Chinese operator tier, fleet-level safety resilience, and the financial distress of the traditional automotive industry as structural forces shaping the mobility transition. It continues to examine the strategic situation in 2026 and beyond of automation and sharing aspects of the competitive dynamics in the emerging automated mobility industry. To do so it continues to apply strategic management, technological innovation, and forecasting frameworks to examine how the different categories of industry entrants position themselves and interact with one another, and their differential chances for success. Related to the different types of entrants it considers various criteria of success, including expected market share of vehicle sales versus miles serviced, and the number of systems, technology solutions, or licenses sold. Whether firms enter the automated mobility industry with a lateral move (de alio) from an adjacent industry or as new entrants without preexisting experience (de novo) turns out to be an important strategic distinction for predicting success. The rate at which the industry is shifting also plays an important role because it defines how much time incumbents have to adapt to change and how much time startups have before their investments must begin to generate positive cash flows.
Our analysis – now updated through June 2026, well over six years after the original paper [37] – suggests that tech companies, ADAS suppliers, and startups with a well-defined focus are most likely to succeed, a conclusion that the intervening period has broadly validated. Commercial robotaxi services are now operating at meaningful scale: Waymo delivers over 500,000 paid 2driverless rides per week across more than ten U.S. cities and is targeting one million weekly rides by end of 2026 [39]; in China, Baidu’s Apollo Go, Pony.ai, and WeRide have collectively executed tens of millions of fully driverless rides and are actively expanding internationally [52, 53]. A global regulatory framework for Automated Driving Systems (ADS) is in the process of being implemented by the United Nations through UNECE, passing a major milestone in late-June 2026 and anticipated to enter into force by end of 2026 [41]; this development has the potential to restructure the competitive geography of the industry by opening markets – above all in Europe – that have to date remained effectively closed to commercial Level 4 deployment. Against this backdrop of tech-company progress, the established automotive industry is under severe financial stress: Volkswagen allegedly plans to eliminate 100,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 [80], Ford wrote off $19.5 billion in EV investments in 2025 [73], Stellantis recorded €22.2 billion in writedowns [74], and Toyota reported its first North American operating loss in sixteen years [75]. The simultaneous pressure of Chinese competition, misaligned ACES investment timing, and U.S. tariff impacts has placed many traditional OEMs in a position of structural vulnerability that materially affects their capacity to compete in the emerging automated mobility industry. The paper ends with highlighting important strategic issues for further discussion with automotive industry researchers, industry analysts, and leading practitioners.