The Volkswagen logo is displayed at the German car maker's booth during a press day ahead of the Geneva International Motor Show on March 6, 2018 in Geneva. The show opens to the public on March 8 and runs through March 18. / AFP PHOTO / HAROLD CUNNINGHAM
Volkswagen AG is open to sharing future autonomous-vehicle systems with other manufacturers as it races to catch up with the likes of Waymo LLC in cost-intensive technologies like self-driving that could transform the way people and goods move, according to an executive at the German automaker.
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Joint projects beyond a deal with Ford Motor Co signed in July – that includes a US$2.6bil (RM10.74bil) investment in its US peer’s affiliate Argo AI LLC – could help spread out costs more widely, said Alexander Hitzinger, VW’s senior vice-president for autonomous driving.
“We do have to catch up in some fields, but we’re not massively far behind here and as VW group we can really generate very large economies of scale,” Hitzinger told Bloomberg on the sidelines of a press briefing in Hamburg. “And this will be a scale game,” he said.
VW’s efforts to develop robotic cars dates back more than a decade to tests hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in the US. But the industrial giant’s unwieldy corporate structure – with operations splattered across 12 automotive brands and 122 factories worldwide – led to fragmented development that allowed quicker rivals to take the lead.
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Hitzinger, who rejoined VW group from Apple Inc after previously holding key engineering positions at Porsche’s motorsport operations, now oversees a newly-formed unit dubbed Volkswagen Autonomy GmbH that’s aimed at bundling projects more efficiently.
The division will have offices in Germany, Silicon Valley and China to attract top talent and develop highly automated driving systems – so-called Level 4 autonomy – that can be scaled up for commercial production starting around 2025. –The Star