A VW E- Golf with five laser scanners on the roof and four cameras in the sides is located in Hamburg. (picture alliance/Markus Scholz/dpa)
Volkswagen wants to see the commercial use of self-driving cars "on a large scale" by the middle of the next decade. To this end, the company is bundling its activities into a new subsidiary, Volkswagen Autonomy. It is also to continue its cooperation with Ford's robot car company Argo AI and in the coming years it will establish subsidiaries in Silicon Valley and China, VW announced on Monday.
The new timeframe is further proof that it will take much longer to bring robot cars to market than was envisaged just a few years ago. For example, 2020 or 2021 were often cited as targets for the industry as a whole. So far, however, there have been only a few tests with commercial operation of self-driving taxis in isolated small areas - above all in the United States.
The Google robot car company Waymo, for example, operates such a service for the residents of a suburb in Phoenix, Arizona. The developer Voyage provides self-driving cars to the residents of a retirement village in Florida.
In April, VW sent out five electric Golf cars onto the streets of Hamburg for its first robot car tests in a major German city. The company wants to develop a self-driving system that can be used as a standard module for all group brands. More than half of the employees of the subsidiary Autonomy will work in Munich and Wolfsburg. The location in Munich will also become the European headquarters of Argo AI.
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