Major car manufacturers like Synthetic engine, Ford and Volvo deepen relationships with key technology partners this week to prepare for the fight against tram the Challenger Tesla Inc and Apple Inc when entering the market.
Three chip companies – Mobileye, Qualcomm and Intel Corp’s Nvidia – emerged from a series of announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as the frontrunners in locking the mind of self-driving cars. in the next decade.
The transactions involved merging scores of older, slower chips into more powerful centralized computers. But to win them over, the chip companies had to agree to let automakers control key parts of the technology.
Earlier, Reuters reported that Apple plans to produce electric cars. Last year, Bloomberg reported that the iPhone maker was aiming for full self-driving capabilities as early as 2025.
For the automakers going head-to-head with Apple and Tesla, the stakes are high. In addition to electrifying their vehicle models, automakers are essentially designing computers with increasingly self-driving capabilities.
That means a huge opportunity for automakers to monetize in-car software and services long after the wheel is out. dealer but only if they can keep customer relationships and data to themselves, the way Tesla and Apple do.
Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive for Nvidia, a maker of high-power chips, said: .
Nvidia this week announced contracts to supply electronic brains for future models from several China tram startup and is working with other automakers, including Mercedes, Hyundai Motor Co, Volvo and Audi .
Technology and data control are areas of tension between automakers and tech companies, Shapiro said. “Control and customization, and who owns the data?”
The answer is complicated because of the incredible amount of technology required to make cars self-driving.
These include computer vision algorithms to help cameras recognize pedestrians, high-definition maps of the world’s roads, and “driving policy” software to make decisions in milliseconds. about how the car will behave in the face of the unexpected.
For chipmakers, this means they need to be ready for every aspect of the technology, but ready for customers to pick and choose.
For example, Qualcomm Inc spent $4.5 billion last year to buy Veoneer Inc to perfect all the software needed to complement self-driving car French fries. But after winning the first major self-driving chip contract with GM This week, those software assets will not be included because GM already has its own assets.
“Our software is all developed in-house. So we’re not going to take a piece of it,” said Jason Ditman, chief engineer for GM’s upcoming “Ultra Cruise” hands-free driving product.
But for other automakers, Qualcomm needs to get all parts of the self-driving system ready, said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president and general manager of automotive for the chipmaker.
“Different automakers find themselves at different points in terms of readiness,” he said. “It’s important for automakers that they have to be able to build the relationship with the customer they’re trying to get.”
Mobileye’s relationship with Ford plays out similarly, Mobileye’s relationship with Ford deepened this week. Mobileye used to offer the camera, chip and self-driving software as an all-in-one product. Now Mobileye will begin to decouple some of the system’s functions and allow Ford to build its own technology on top of them.
“We provide all the outputs to Ford and they run their own algorithms on our outputs,” Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua told Reuters.
Chip companies have little choice but to be more flexible as they face significant competitors of their own.
Phil Amsrud, senior principal analyst at IHS Markit, said automakers have relied on three main suppliers for simpler combustion engine control semiconductors – Infineon, Renesas and NXP.
However, the market for chip companies that supply high-powered computers to vehicle manufacturers is relatively crowded, including Chinese companies such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and computer vision company Ambarella Inc. moving into the automotive sector.
“We’re at a point where we can get too many suppliers,” Amsrud said. “If you look at cars in the traditional way, there’s never more than a few.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Joseph White in Detroit; Editing by Richard Chang)
