Just a few years ago, automotive companies were promising that by this
time we would have had self-driving cars and autonomous car-ride services.
Reality turned out somewhat different, although all big automakers are
investing in driverless technology and continue to work toward offering
self-driving platforms and vehicles at some point in the next decade.
Despite the fact that new tech-automotive alliances continue to be forged,
carmakers are now more realistically suggesting that the driverless car is
still years away from autonomously driving on roads.
Still, the biggest car manufacturers continue to invest in autonomous
technology and software companies, aiming to move to the forefront of the
driverless vehicle market in what looks like will be a crowded competition
scene.
The latest such investment came from one of the top-selling automotive
groups globally, South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group.
Hyundai said
this week that it would form a joint venture with Aptiv to advance the
development of production-ready autonomous driving systems for
commercialization of Level 4 and 5 self-driving technologies.
The joint venture is planned to start testing fully driverless systems
next year. In 2022, it will have a production-ready autonomous driving
platform available for robotaxi providers, fleet operators, and automotive
manufacturers, Hyundai said.
In terms of investment, Hyundai and Aptiv will each have a 50-percent
stake in the joint venture, which is valued at a total of US$4 billion.
Hyundai Motor Group affiliates Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, and Hyundai Mobis
will collectively contribute US$1.6 billion in cash and US$400 million in
vehicle engineering services, R&D resources, and access to intellectual
property. Aptiv, for its part, will contribute its autonomous driving technology,
intellectual property, and approximately 700 employees.
The 2022 date for production-ready autonomous driving platform is not a
promise we’ll have self-driving cars in mass use, as Bloomberg Opinion
columnist David Fickling writes.
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Still, investment of US$2 billion in the autonomous vehicles joint venture
over several years is good use of Hyundai’s money, and is little compared to
Hyundai’s US$10 billion in annual investment in R&D, Fickling notes.
Although the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture won’t start selling autonomous
driving platforms in the millions in three years’ time, investment in such
technologies is the future for a carmaker that doesn’t want to be left behind
in the self-driving revolution.
Other automakers are also advancing driverless technology plans, but they
are also admitting that the self-driving car is not as close as many thought
a few years ago.
In April this year, Ford’s CEO Jim Hackett admitted that they
“overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” and that self-driving
“applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is
so complex,” as carried by Bloomberg.
Ford, however, continues to test self-driving on public streets and said
this week that Austin, Texas, will become its third launch market for
self-driving vehicles, along with Miami-Dade County and Washington, D.C. Ford
will expand its testing operations to Austin in collaboration with Argo AI,
in which Ford is an investor.
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Ford is
also collaborating with Germany’s Volkswagen and Argo AI to introduce
autonomous vehicle technology in the U.S. and Europe, “positioning both
companies to better serve customers while improving their competitiveness and
cost and capital efficiencies,” as Volkswagen said in July announcing the
collaboration.
Another of Detroit’s Big Three, General Motors, said in July via its
self-driving unit—Cruise—that it would delay
commercial deployment of driverless vehicles beyond the 2019 target it had
set because the cars needed more tests.
Despite setbacks in the timeline of commercially deploying driverless
cars, automakers are not giving up on efforts to advance self-driving
technology and boost investments in what they believe would be the future of
mobility in a decade or two.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
