Picture the near future, which is closer than it looks. You open an app and a car arrives with no driver and a non-useful steering wheel. The ride to the airport that costs $70 today will cost $20. Before long, you may not own a car at all. And with that, the brand of the car sent to pick you up will mean almost nothing. You did not buy the car. You summoned a service. So what, exactly, are you choosing?

That is the question the entire driverless industry needs to answer. How do you build a brand for something you can’t see?

In the driverless economy, the brand becomes what’s inside the car as well as the user experience both in the app and in the ride. When the vehicle becomes a service you summon rather than a possession you own, the decision stops being Ford or Volkswagen and becomes something more intimate and important. Whose artificial intelligence is driving? Whose safety and crash-avoidance system is inside? Whose connectivity keeps me seamlessly online? Whose interior lets me work on the way to the meeting? The car turns into a platform, and the relevant brands are the systems riding inside it.

This insider-out branding is already happening. Waymo talks about the Waymo Driver. Tesla sells Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Mobileye built an entire ingredient brand around the intelligence that lets a car see. Mercedes named its automated system Drive Pilot. Some of these names are strong and some are placeholders, but the pattern is unmistakable: The value and the trust are migrating to the named layers inside the vehicle.

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