Two of the global auto industry?s leading suppliers are combining forces to develop technology for self-driving cars, aiming to provide manufacturers with a ready-made self-driving platform. Delphi and Mobileye have entered a partnership to build a platform for fully autonomous driving that will be showcased in a matter of months and production-ready for their customers by 2019. By working together, representatives of the two companies say they can rapidly build a system that can be integrated into vehicles of any type and used in urban and highway settings.
?Our two companies are entering a partnership that we believe reshapes the automated-driving landscape,? said Delphi president and CEO Kevin Clark.
The companies did not disclose their levels of investment, but Clark said their development efforts would together add up to ?hundreds of millions? of dollars. If they succeed, they could essentially level the playing field, enabling automakers who haven?t yet invested in autonomous systems to catch up quickly. The partnership is the latest in a series of seismic shifts over the past week in the realm of autonomous driving. Volvo and Uber announced they will put fully autonomous vehicles on the road in test scenarios by the end of this year, and Ford outlined plans to mass-produce fully autonomous vehicles by 2021. As a result, the projected timeframe in which self-driving cars might arrive has rapidly condensed.
Each of these projects describes a different path...