Within three years, some city dwellers may be using their smartphones to summon fully self-driving taxis produced by two of Germany’s biggest automotive mainstays. Daimler and Bosch have announced they’ve formed a new alliance that intends to bring production-ready, fully autonomous vehicles to urban areas “by the start of the next decade.”
The project combines the vehicle experience of Daimler, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, with the hardware and systems of Bosch, the world’s largest automotive supplier. Should their combined ambitions reach reality by 2020, the pair could be one of the first entrants to deploy fleets of shared autonomous vehicles.
“In promoting a system for fully automated driverless vehicles for city driving, Bosch and Daimler want to improve traffic flows, enhance road safety, and provide an important building block for the traffic of the future,” Daimler officials said in a statement.
Details on where they may first launch aren’t yet available, but Bosch and Daimler will join a crowded field of companies and alliances in the pursuit of shared autonomous fleets. Competitors include ride-hailing service Uber, which has partnered with Volvo and others; Waymo, which receives minivans from Fiat Chrysler for autonomous testing; and General Motors, which invested $500 million in ride-hailing service Lyft.
For Daimler, the announced ambitions mark its latest foray into a new mobility business. The company already owns car2go, the world’s largest car-sharing service with more than 2.2 million members. Last summer, Daimler created another subsidiary, called moovel, that allows users to search, book, and pay for rides across modes on a single app.
It’s clear Daimler intends to use these as complementary parts of its overall mobility strategy.
“Among other things, this technology will increase the attractiveness of car sharing,” a company spokesperson said in a written statement. “It will allow people to make optimum use of the time they spend in cars and open up new ways of being mobile to people without driver’s licenses.”
For Bosch, the new partnership represents the first use for the brainpower it recently announced it is collaborating on with chipmaker Nvidia, one of the leading developers of artificial-intelligence technology.
Together, Bosch and Daimler aim to produce Level 4 autonomous vehicles, which operate without the need of a human driver under certain geographic or other route-specific limitations, and then Level 5 vehicles, which can operate in all environments with no restrictions. Specifics aren’t yet known on which vehicle or vehicles Daimler intends to use in the taxi fleets, but the Mercedes-Benz F 015 autonomous concept (interior shown above) might be a good place to start.
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