Study Ranks Ford and GM as Autonomous Vehicle Leaders

Navigant Consulting Inc.’s latest autonomous vehicle report says Ford and General Motors are leading the way when it comes to developing and deploying automated vehicle technologies.

The two carmakers rank first and second in both strategy and execution. Ford earns top marks for the former and GM is ahead on the latter, according to the authors. Renault-Nissan and Daimler are closely behind Ford and GM in third and fourth place, respectively.

Daimler was the top-ranked company in a similar study Navigant published in October 2015. GM ranked fourth in that study. Ford ranked sixth best at the time, while Renault-Nissan was one of the lowest-rated companies.

The second-tier “contenders” in this year’s study are led by Volkswagen, BMW and Google’s Waymo unit. Others grouped in this category are Delphi, Hyundai-Kia, PSA, Tesla, Toyota, Volvo/Autoliv/Zenuity and ZF. These companies currently don’t have partnerships, levels of investments and/or consumer trust as the top four companies, Navigant says.

Bringing up the rear this year are Chinese tech firm Baidu, nuTonomy—a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Honda and Uber. Navigant says Honda has the worst strategy, while Uber fared the worst on execution.

The 18 companies were evaluated on 10 criteria: vision, go-to market strategy, partners, production strategy, technology, sales and marketing, product capability, product quality/reliability, product portfolio and staying power. Unlike the 2015 study, which rated only carmakers, this year’s study also included suppliers and tech companies.