2017-2018 Vehicle Innovations Forecasting Challenge

The first tournament ran from April 2016 to December 2016, and allowed us to get hands-on experience with respect to how these tournaments operate, and to assess their potential utility vis-à-vis industry forecasting. The second tournament ran from July 2017 to August 2018. This tournament built on the momentum that we generated during the 2016 challenge and was significantly broader than the previous challenge in terms of the topics covered. We have composed a report that details the design, the findings, and the learnings from the second tournament. Specifically, the report sets forth the following:

  1. An overview of the challenge
  2. A discussion on what we have learned about disruption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) from our challenges
  3. A discussion on the forecasting trends from the challenge
  4. A discussion about the top forecasters in our challenges
  5. A detailed analysis of each question in our challenge
  6. A deep dive into the critical EV-related topic of average battery cost
  7. An outline of our plans for the next challenge

This tournament attracted nearly 1,600 forecasters who made nearly 12,000 forecasts on predictions covering specific developments in technology, automaker strategies, the competitive landscape and the regulatory environment. This has allowed us to observe in real-time the uncertainties and the dynamics underlying this changing landscape, and to create a large-scale dataset involving tens of thousands of probabilistic predictions by forecasters on specific questions across a range of topics, along with the rationale for the specific prediction in many cases.