Good smartphones (with capacitive touch-screens, and webkit-based browsers) are also revolutionary. But there's only two companies making much money out of them, and only one of them has been in the phone industry for long (and even Samsung was never that great at phones).

Cars don't just sell a way to get from point A to point B. They sell an experience. If that experience becomes "put your destination into your GPS, then play Angry Birds for a while", then it will turn the car itself into a commodity.

Right but BMW/Daimler/et al's company models are not based around the kind of massive 'moonshot' R&D that is needed to enter this market with a full self-driving car.

They do a lot of R&D but in a very structured way that produces the consistent results their shareholders ask for. The market might be disrupted but until that happens convincingly they will do everything they can to prevent it while adopting the low hanging fruits of automatic parking etc.

They might consider licensing the technology from Google or buying startups working on the tech but even then they might just bury the startups to delay their main business model being disrupted. I think it's going to take disruption from outside the main car manufacturers - in the same way it took Tesla entering the electric car market to shake it up.

You're partially right; except that in this race they would prefer to be the first as late as possible.

For that you would optimize being the most ready to run, but trying to get the group not to run for as long as possible.