Access to self-drive technologies drives Silicon Valley takeovers

Silicon Valley has new visitors: the bankers working for automakers that specialize in acquiring or investing in companies that enable self-driving cars and improve battery-powered vehicles. Automakers have snooze-you-lose concerns that the number of tech companies at the leading edge is finite, and if you don’t lock them up, your competitor might.

Investment groups are looking for providers of radar, lidar, cameras, sensors, night vision, and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, plus the algorithms and software that tells rocks from cars and people from telephone poles and decides when the car ahead edging into your lane goes from sloppy driving to serious hazard. They may also be looking at infotainment companies controlling the center stack.