Volvo Cars, the Swedish premium automaker, has signed a letter with Autoliv Inc to form a new jointly-owned company whose sole purpose is to develop, license, and propagate self-driving technology.
The new company, which as of now does not yet have a firm name, will be headquartered in Gothenburg just like Volvo is and will be staffed by a workforce of 200 that were plucked from both companies. In the near term, they’re planning an expansion to roughly a personnel count of over 600.
Due to begin operations in early 2017, the company will be focused on developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) as well as autonomous drive (AD) systems for use, naturally, in Volvo cars but will also be available for sale exclusively by Autoliv to all automakers worldwide.
Volvo is currently one of the leaders in self-driving vehicle technology, aiming for Level 4 or fully autonomous ability to be baked into vehicles in the near future.
While they aren’t rolling out these kinds of features to its own current crop of passenger cars yet, the automaker says that perfecting the system is paramount to ensuring a smooth adoption by the general public.
They have conducted numerous technology trials both on closed circuits and public roads and are collaborating with ride sharing services like Uber to simultaneously advance the system’s sophistication as well as exposing more people to the benefits and potential of autonomous vehicles. All of these endeavours use the XC90 with special sensor arrays to drive itself.
Autoliv on the other hand is the one of the world’s leading supplier of safety systems to automakers and led the way in the development and introduction of active and passive safety technologies to the world’s car makers for more than 60 years.
Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars, said: “By combining our know how and resources we will create a world leader in AD software development. This means we can introduce this exciting technology to our customers faster.”
Apart from the mutual financial and market benefits to the joint venture between Volvo and Autoliv, by having a common provider to supply self-driving technology to automotive manufacturers will streamline the market and could promote a much quicker adoption rate of new technologies that are currently being muddied by the sheer number of brands chasing the same end goal with varying levels of effectiveness (and ensuing legal battles).
Perhaps more importantly, only a few vehicle manufacturers have the resources to pursue autonomous technology at all much less achieve feature parity with every other contender and beyond. Licensing the technology from Volvo/Autoliv will level the playing field.
The joint venture firm plans to have its first ADAS products available for sale by 2019 and its AD offerings ready by 2021.
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