Volvo Cars and ride-sharing company Uber have established a joint project to develop autonomous driving cars. The base vehicles will be manufactured by Volvo Cars and then purchased from Volvo by Uber. The companies will contribute a combined USD 300 million to the project, which they view as the beginning of a longer term industrial partnership.
Both Uber and Volvo will use the same base vehicle for the next stage of their own autonomous car strategies. Uber will add its own self-developed autonomous driving systems to the Volvo base vehicle while Volvo will use the same base vehicle for the next stage of its own autonomous car strategy, which will involve fully autonomous driving.
The new base vehicle will be developed on Volvo Cars’ fully modular Scalable Product Architecture (SPA). Engineers from both companies will add to the scalability of the SPA platform to include the safety, redundancy and new features required to have autonomous vehicles on the road.
