The shorter the news, the bigger the matter, and last night's explosive news quickly attracted the attention of netizens. There are reports that Volkswagen Group is in talks with Huawei to buy Huawei's autonomous driving division for billions of euros. For a time, speculations such as "Huawei gave up automatic driving" and "Huawei can't hold back" were quickly spread by the melon-eating masses.
It is reasonable to say that automatic driving is the most important development direction in the era of intelligent vehicles, Huawei, as China's technology leader, will not give up this field, so what is Volkswagen's intention to acquire Huawei's automatic driving department?
Here we first clarify why Volkswagen bought Huawei's autonomous driving division. Although the ID. pure electric series created by the Volkswagen MEB platform has a good reputation, there are still shortcomings in product intelligence, in the new energy era of "software-defined cars", Volkswagen is obviously a bit inadequate, and even the group's senior management itself claims that the negotiation on the acquisition of Huawei's autonomous driving department involves a technical system that Volkswagen is not good at.
Since you are not good at it, let it be good at this aspect. Diester, President of Volkswagen Group, said that Volkswagen has been committed to making a lot of investment in software, building its own IP through partnerships, sequential growth, major acquisitions and other relationships, and recruiting technical talents. Prior to this, the Volkswagen Group announced a $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI, a self-driving company owned by Ford, to explore the field of autonomous driving. And they also began to reach an agreement with Bosch, the giant in the "intelligent transportation" world, last year to acquire the software developer Hella Aglaia team, thus achieving self-sufficiency in the field of automotive software.
From this point of view, the Volkswagen wants to acquire Huawei's automatic driving department, it is very likely to find a reliable partner in the software field in China, Huawei, as a technology leader, naturally entered the acquisition list of Volkswagen's "wide net", which is also in line with Diess' intentions.
But back to the essence of the problem, if Huawei and volkswagen negotiate, does it mean that Huawei will give up the field of automatic driving? In fact, first of all, huawei's autonomous driving team specifically mentioned that Huawei will continue to increase investment in the automotive industry in the future, and this year's investment in research and development will reach 1 billion US dollars, with a research and development team of more than 5,000 people, including more than 2,000 autonomous driving teams. Combined with the above mentioned above, from this point of view, Huawei will not be able to give up the field of automatic driving.
Second, according to another original report, Volkswagen is considering acquiring a business unit specializing in autonomous driving from Chinese technology company Huawei. From this point of view, Volkswagen is not acquiring Huawei's overall autonomous driving business segment, but should only be a relatively independent small sector.
In recent years, there have been continuous huawei car talk, after all, brands such as Cyrus, Polar Fox, Avita, etc., almost all of them cannot escape the relationship with Huawei, but no matter which brand, Huawei has not held equity, just to invest in technology, in other words, Huawei just provides them with technology, which is also the route that Huawei has been taking. As Huawei said, "Don't build cars, help car companies build good cars."
Therefore, Volkswagen's acquisition of Huawei's automatic driving department is basically a meaning of cooperation with Volkswagen and Bosch, there is no such thing as "Huawei abandons the field of automatic driving", and this is all distorted by the melon-eating masses in their own way of thinking, after all, there are always two sides to the facts. Or maybe we can expect volkswagens equipped with Huawei's self-driving technology to go on sale?