One is Volkswagen, one of the world's largest automotive groups, and the other is the world's largest auto parts supplier, and they will work together to develop the autonomous driving system of the future.
In the future, they will focus on Stuttgart, Germany, and Ingolstadt, and the two companies will cooperate in many places. At its peak, the two companies will have more than a thousand experts participating. By the way, Audi is headquartered in Ingolstadt.
The specific operation process is that Bosch will establish a partnership with Cariad, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, to accelerate the installation of autonomous driving functions in all series of models, and it will meet the demand for mass production.
In the future, it will introduce autonomous driving functions for Volkswagen's brand cars, that is, full range of passenger cars. Specifically, the L2 level off-hand intelligent driving system for urban, peri-urban and highway driving, and the L3 level conditional driving system for highway driving, are specifically involved.
As early as 2018, when participating in the Bosch Technology Experience Day, Bosch experts believed that the road to autonomous driving was still long, and even proposed that who dared to say that they could do it all must be bragging.
At that time, Bosch believed that chassis development was the strength of automakers, sensor cameras were manufacturers such as SONY, algorithms needed professional third-party technology, and processors had to rely on NVIDIA and other support.
Therefore, reliable automatic driving must be promoted by multi-party cooperation, and no brand dares to say that it can do it all.
Bosch's autonomous driving research and development has always implemented a dual strategy, not only directly carrying out the research and development and pilot work of L4 and L5 level full automatic driving and unmanned high automation, but also carrying out the mass production of L2 and L3 level technologies, and gradually promoting it.
This time, Bosch and Volkswagen's intelligent driving research and development, the technical focus is on the research and development of information collected based on 360-degree surround perception, as well as data-driven software.
Whether the future automatic driving is smart depends on the real road traffic data, this principle is similar to the car navigation system, the more real road traffic data, the partial and highly automated driving function design will be more reliable and more natural. For example, the "rare cases" in real data are the difficulties that plague the system.
Real-time information processing on the road is the key, and real road traffic is the best training ground for autonomous driving research and development. So Bosch relies on Volkswagen to obtain a large amount of data for its R&D projects, which will help to further upgrade the autonomous driving system.
In addition to real data, the R&D environment will also utilize AI technology.
Bosch and Volkswagen are still working on the L3 level intelligent driving platform, and the first intelligent driving systems will begin to be assembled and applied in 2023. The two sides also agreed to study the possibility of joint research and development goals and timelines for L4 autonomous driving.
It seems that reliable autonomous driving must be promoted by multi-party cooperation, and no brand can do it all by itself.