IT Home news on February 22, the Financial Associated Press learned from people familiar with the matter that Volkswagen is discussing with Huawei Automotive BU to acquire the project team of the latter's autonomous driving department, and plans to release further information at the end of March.
IT Home has reported that the German media "Manager Magazine" previously said that Volkswagen Group is negotiating with Huawei to acquire Huawei's overseas autonomous driving division (or a 700-person research and development team) for billions of euros, and the two sides have not been inconclusive for several months. A volkswagen group spokesman said it would not comment on the news, while Volkswagen China officials and Huawei also said they would not comment.
The cooperation between Volkswagen Group and Huawei can be traced back to the cooperation in the field of V2X in 2017, and in the following year, Huawei announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Audi brand of volkswagen group to jointly develop intelligent and connected vehicles, and Audi provided ADS autonomous driving technology solutions.
ADS is Huawei's full stack autonomous driving system designed for China's road and traffic environments and aimed at the user's driving experience. Huawei ADS fully integrates the capabilities of chips, algorithms, and massive data, supports flexible combinations of functional features, and meets the needs of different levels of autonomous driving at L4 to L2+ levels based on the L4 level autonomous driving architecture. The self-developed high-computing power SoC chip is designed from top to bottom according to the autonomous driving business process, enabling high-performance processing of multiple sensor data and complex regulatory decision-making. The self-developed core algorithm is optimized for the design and optimization of complex driving environments such as urban roads, highways, and urban parking, especially for China's rich traffic environment.
Judging from Huawei's official website, the test cars before Huawei ADS are almost all customized models of traditional car companies such as Audi.
By October 2021, it was reported that Huawei plans to form a joint venture with Volkswagen Group to develop autonomous driving technology. One of the ways in which the two sides discussed cooperation is that the Volkswagen Group will invest and become the controlling party of the joint venture, and Huawei will mainly provide technical IP (that is, intellectual property rights). Among them, the technical IP provided by Huawei includes not only software technologies such as automatic driving, but also Huawei's chip IP.
At first, Huawei responded that the news was not true. However, it was not until January 2022 that Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan personally confirmed that Volkswagen and Huawei were indeed in discussions, but there was no confirmable news at this stage, "including the establishment of a joint venture between the two parties" .