Commentary
Volkswagen Forms New Company To Develop Self-Driving Taxis, Robo Vans
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, October 29, 2019
Volkswagen is getting more serious about the future of self-driving vehicles.
The carmaker is establishing the subsidiary Volkswagen Autonomy as a center of excellence for autonomous driving to bring self-driving systems to market.
The first applications are planned in the commercial sector.
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles will develop and build special purpose vehicles, such as robo taxis and robo vans, Volkswagen stated in the announcement.
"Autonomous driving presents the entire industry with major challenges: high development costs, extremely high demands on sensor technology plus a lack of regulatory systems and heterogeneous regional standards," stated Alexander Hitzinger, senior vice president for autonomous driving in the Volkswagen Group, who is responsible for technical development at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles.
"Our goal is to build an agile, high-performance development team with the know-how to realize a self-driving system ready to market."
In 2020 and 2021, two more companies are planned, one in Silicon Valley and another in China, in addition to the one in Germany.
Volkswagen plans to start commercializing large-scale autonomous driving “around the middle of the next decade,” states Hitzinger.
Earlier this year, the Volkswagen Group said it was investing $2.6 billion in Argo AI, the Ford-backed autonomous driving startup.
The current plan is for the two ventures to work together on self-driving systems.
The self-driving realization is proving a lot tougher than it first looked.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
"Our goal is to build an agile, high-performance development team with the know-how to realize a self-driving system ready to market."
The Agile , High performance , self-driving system they should realize is ...........
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"Connected relationship " with your car and Dunkin' Donuts.