Hyundai Motor Co and Volkswagen AG (VW) each said they are partnering with a US autonomous vehicle tech firm led by former executives from Google, Tesla Inc and Uber Technologies Inc.
The companies on Thursday announced partnerships with Aurora Innovation LLC, started last year by ex-Google autonomous car chief Chris Urmson and others.
Volkswagen said its collaboration would help bring self-driving cars quickly to roads worldwide, while autonomous Hyundais are expected to be on the market by 2021.
The partnerships are the latest in a string of tie-ups between traditional auto companies and tech firms as they race to be first with self-driving vehicles.
Aurora is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Palo Alto, California. It was started last year by Urmson, former Tesla executive Sterling Anderson and ex-Uber autonomous vehicle leader Drew Bagnell.
Terms of each partnership were not released, but Aurora CEO Urmson said the start-up would make a profit by helping Hyundai and Volkswagen develop safe autonomous vehicles.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Urmson said he is not sure exactly where money would be made in autonomous vehicles, adding that it could be from developing sophisticated sensing and guidance systems, manufacturing vehicles or providing transportation as a service.
“The way the economics play out over time is still far from foregone,” he said. “We still don’t know which of these pieces will be dominant, or if they will find a happy equilibrium.”
Urmson left Alphabet Inc’s Google in 2016 after more than seven years of work on its autonomous vehicles.
At Tesla, Anderson led development of the company’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system after its initial release, and he led development of the Model X sport utility vehicle, according to Aurora’s Web site.
Bagnell was a founding member of Uber’s Advanced Technology Center that has been working on autonomous cars in Pittsburgh.
Germany-based Volkswagen, which produces about 10 million vehicles annually, hopes the tie-up will bring autonomous vehicle technology to all of its brands.
The company said it has been working with Aurora for the past six months, integrating its sensors, hardware and software into Volkswagen vehicles.
Hyundai said the partnership with Aurora would bring autonomous vehicles to market that can operate without human input in most conditions.
The partnership has yet to say how its first batch of self-driving vehicles would be used, but analysts expect that they will likely be for commercial use, such as self-driving taxis or ride-hailing services, rather than for sales to individual consumers.
General Motors Co in November last year said that its self-driving vehicles would carry passengers and deliver goods in big cities by 2019.
Renault SA, Nissan Motor Co and Mitsubishi Motors Corp are also ready to climb aboard robo-taxis — just not without pooling up to share the cost of the ride.
The Franco-Japanese alliance is lining up partners for its push into shared driverless vehicles and plans to unveil names in coming months, said Ogi Redzic, a senior vice president overseeing about 1,000 employees developing connectivity services for the group.
The three automakers want to work with technology companies that are already experimenting with self-driving cars, he said, citing Google and Uber as examples.
“Tech companies aren’t going to build and sell cars to our current customers,” said Redzic, a former Nokia Oyj executive.
For them, autonomous technology enables and enhances their main businesses, he said.
Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi plan to develop 15 models with autonomous features by 2022, including one fully self-driving vehicle. Combined, the companies last year spent a total of US$8.3 billion on research and development — on par with General Motors.
The alliance has already reached some agreements to share the research and development burden. Nissan has been working with mobile game editor DeNA Co on autonomous cabs to be tested in Yokohama, Japan, next year, while Renault teamed up with French transportation services provider Transdev to develop self-driving fleets.
The alliance signed a deal with Microsoft Corp last year to coinvest on developing back-end cloud technology fit for autonomous vehicles.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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