If traditional car companies are not too far behind Google, and are able to confidently compete in this space, then Apple definitely has a chance to compete in this space.
Many or most adults in the developed world currently own a car. If you can share them even between, say 3 people the number of cars required will plummet. There are credible predictions around as well that even say up to 10 people might be able to share a car.
There is already over capacity in car production globally. Self-driving cars are likely to drive that even further.
It's not a good market for a company that isn't in the game to be going in to. Google are different because they seem to be selling the technology to enable other manufacturers to sell self-driving cars.
Also keep in mind that while the number of cars sold might go down, it's also fairly likely that the margin on each car will go up, and the total number of miles driven will go up as well. Basically when you take the unwanted part of driving out of the equation (sitting in traffic wasting time) and don't need driver attention anymore, you can start adding all kinds of value-add features to vehicles like giant in-vehicle displays or massage chairs. And if you can do whatever you want while on the road, longer commutes aren't so bad, so it's easy to put more miles on a car in a year, which means more replacement parts, service visits, etc. over time.
The market will no doubt change significantly, but existing OEMs are by no means going to be excluded entirely.
Unless self driving cars dramatically increase the lifespan of the average car, things will balance out in a few years.
In two car households does the second car primarily get purchased for use when the first car is sitting idle but just in the wrong location?
Might there be a change in ownership as a sort of "buy-to-let" system comes in where owners wouldn't be able to buy an autonomous vehicle but afford it as they send the vehicle out to work doing deliveries/taxiing people during the times they don't need it?
It seems quite hard to predict how autonomous vehicles will change things; a lot of it will depend on regulations on how they're manned - will a driver with a license still be required at all times? Will there be new licenses? Will autonomous vehicles have extra restrictions on their speed or which roads they use? Will there be protectionist laws to prevent them picking up and taxiing people? The surrounding legislation will probably be as important to the way the evolution of car use happens.
Car sharing is an interesting possibility, but it may turn out people will live at the farthest distance they can possibly live [due to costs], thus will be unable to afford even a five minute detour that is critical for enabling sharing.
I expect real estate to explode, car production to increase, possibly significantly, and we'll spend a whole lot more time in our private mobile offices.
Also some of the freight traffic will be shifted to nights; self-driving cars will allow door-to-door service, so number of parking spaces will be reduced; also when no driver is needed you get that extra seat.
I do feel that Google (and Apple) have an edge. Traditional car companies (at least in Germany) are driven by engineers and usually decision makers tend to be ex-engineers. They have a subtly different attitude towards programming and software (often only working with Matlab and the like) and I often feel like software isn't all that important to them. Alas software is eating the world is especially true in this segment. I don't know how to succinctly say it without sounding like "ZOMG programmers > engineers haha" elitism but I think "software first" thinking and not "engineering first" thinking is the principle that will succeed in this space.
If you do a self-driving pod then it's another story because then you share the cost between passengers and you can engineer it to only go city speeds for instance.
What I'm essentially saying is that at the point Googles research becomes "a reality" the car becomes the weak part of the equation. When we have full autonomy, I might almost just take a train (that will probably always be much faster than cars because of physics) and catch another autonomous pod at the other station. This is of course what could/should happen in theory, not what will happen.
http://www.mobileye.com/technology/applications/
Apple sure has shot. But it's upphill battle.
What's interesting to me is that the technology gap seems to be closing with the rapid advancement of sensors and embedded processors, and more standardized approaches to computer vision, machine learning, etc. making their way into automotive applications. Volvo is obviously taking advantage of this in a great way.
Tesla's are actively collecting data all the time for autopilot-enabled cars, even if autopilot isn't purchased. Some basic info here: http://electrek.co/2016/04/11/google-self-driving-car-tesla-...
The usage of this data is relatively unknown, but based on how autopilot is improved week to week it is assumed that it is being used to learn the speed to take turns, where lanes are, etc. The provider of Tesla's autopilot hardware (partially) calls this something like "Active Mapping". Or something.
The reason you're not wrong though is that Google has more sensor-rich data. Tesla vehicles currently just don't have the same level of sensor package onboard. So Google has a lot of data Tesla can't get.