Technology companies such as Google Inc are unlikely to become mass car manufacturers, even if they have the potential to disrupt an industry increasingly focused on software and automated driving, the head of German carmaker Daimler AG said on Friday.
In recent years, automakers and Silicon Valley companies have grown increasingly interdependent, because next-generation cars need advanced software and sensors, shaking up the traditional pecking order among carmakers and their suppliers.
While Google unveiled a self-driving car last year, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche said the US company’s objective was probably to better understand how cars are used, rather than to become a manufacturer in its own right.
“Google and the likes want to get involved, I don’t think in the first place to build vehicles,” Zetsche told analysts, adding that Google was studying the home, the office and the car as places where people spend time.
“We have to understand that, and then find our roles, to which extent they are complementary, to which extent we become dependent, to which extent we are competitors,” he added.
Daimler, which owns the Mercedes-Benz brand, plans to put great emphasis on controlling data from self-driving and other cars.
“When we talk about high safety with Mercedes, it does not apply specifically to protection from accidents, but this means safety of their personal data as well. To be able to provide that, we have to keep control, and we can’t do that when it is collected by Google,” Zetsche said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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