Incorporating new technologies in mass-produced automobiles has always been a risky business: the unfortunate fellow who suggested that redesigned engine valves might improve the performance of Henry Ford’s Model T was pitched from a moving car into the company parking lot by Ford’s security chief. Although the chances of suffering this particularly humiliating fate may have declined, in many ways the difficulties of introducing new technologies into automobiles have not.

One challenge is the way unpredictable events outside the auto industry can profoundly affect the development of new vehicle-related technologies inside it. In the late 1970s, for example, many US original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their suppliers, betting heavily that fuel prices would reach astronomical levels by the 1980s, planned to increase their production of four-cylinder engines significantly. When oil prices came down to earth and remained there, such companies—locked into a five- to seven-year product development cycle for these engines—had little time to react to a new market that demanded power rather than fuel efficiency.

Even when the industry’s external environment doesn’t change, predicting where, how, and when a technology will catch on is difficult. For starters, new technologies can have very long gestation periods. Automotive antilock brake systems,...