Autonomous vehicles won't only kill jobs. They will create them, too Posted on : Aug 11 - 2018

When Will Mouat, 41, heard there might be a career opportunity in self-driving cars, he jumped. Even though he did not have an engineering background – a lawyer, Mouat had previously worked on the legal teams at PicsArt, a software company, and Shazam, an app that recognizes music – he was enthralled by the potential of the field.

"I would gladly swim across an ocean of thumbtacks to work on this problem with this team," Mouat said.

The team was made up of Chris Urmson and Sterling Anderson. Urmson had been chief technical officer of Google's self-driving car division, and Anderson was the former head of Autopilot at Tesla. Together, they started Aurora, one of a growing field of start-ups working on self-driving cars.

Today, Mouat is vice president and general counsel of Aurora.

New technology is often met with fear, and self-driving cars are no different. Americans are hesitant to trust autonomous vehicles, according to the Pew Research Center. Two fatal accidents this year did not improve consumer opinion.

There is also worry about the number of jobs the new technology might eliminate.

Driving change

Yet the autonomous vehicle industry is creating jobs, as well, especially as multiple companies race to put the first self-driving car into action. Autonomous driving job listings increased 27 percent year over year in January 2018, according to ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace. From the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018, the amount of postings boomed 250 percent on the site due to a hiring spree at the beginning of the year.

There is anecdotal evidence that start-ups are growing. Aurora has expanded from a team of three in 2016 to more than 150 people across multiple facilities, the company said. Zoox, another start-up, said it has grown from four people in 2014 to more than 520 today. Both companies say they are hiring aggressively and don't expect to slow down in the next few years.

Other more established companies are joining in. Tesla has been building an autopilot feature since 2014, and both Apple and Google parent company Alphabet are developing their own self-driving car models.

Traditional automotive companies are also investing. Ford recently announced that the automaker plans to spend $4 billion on autonomous vehicles by 2023. General Motors will pour $100 million into self-driving cars, and Toyota launched a $2.8 billion self-driving car company in Tokyo. View More