Volvo has announced that Zenuity, the autonomous research company which the Swedish car maker owns a 50 per cent stake in, is to be split in two. One half of the new company will be focused entirely on researching and developing 'unsupervised' autonomous cars, and will be wholly owned by Volvo.
Reaffirms commitment to autonomous vehicles
Why does this matter? Well, quite apart from the fact that it means - if nothing else - that work and life still go on in the midst of the global shut-down, it also has major implications for the future of autonomous car research. Autonomy had been, in perception at least, somewhat in the doldrums for a while, with some experts voicing doubts that we might ever see the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles.
Volvo's decision, along with Veoneer, the joint owner of Zenuity, seems to underline the ambition to produce a fully robotic vehicle, that can go about its business with no human intervention.
Company itself will be autonomous
Technically, the new company will be autonomous itself and will have it's own management structure. Staff currently working in locations such as Gothenburg in Sweden and Shanghai in China will be transferred to the new company, while those working in Germany and the US will revert to Veoneer. The new company will use Volvo's SPA2 vehicle architecture to develop its products, though, and is expected to be fully operational by the back end of this year.
'Safe, unsupervised, autonomous driving
"Volvo Cars is committed to introduce safe, unsupervised autonomous drive on highways with its next generation of cars," said Håkan Samuelsson, chief executive at Volvo Cars. "Allowing the new company to fully focus on this development will help us deliver on those ambitions."
"The new company will develop safe and advanced autonomous drive software," said Dennis Nobelius, Zenuity's chief executive. "We believe that in the future there will only be a limited number of global software platforms for autonomous driving. We intend to develop one of these winning platforms."