new York Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles is starting a new test run to get self-driving cars on the road. From this July, ten ID.Buzz electric minibuses will be making their rounds in Austin, Texas, as the group announced on Thursday.
“Expanding our autonomous vehicle program to the North America region is the next step in our global strategic roadmap,” said VW Commercial Vehicle Board Member Christian Senger. The trial run is intended to help “test and refine the technology”. The aim is to “establish commercially available transport offers”.
To this end, the group has founded the new subsidiary Volkswagen ADMT, which stands for “Autonomous Driving Mobility and Transport”. It is based in Austin and Belmont, California.
The subsidiary is under construction and should employ several hundred people by 2026, explained the new manager, Karin Lohmann. The Austin location is ideal for starting test drives. “The state and the city are very open to new technologies.”
The start-up Argo AI, which Volkswagen had set up together with Ford, had already tested autonomous cars in Austin. In autumn, however, the two manufacturers could not agree on the necessary new investments – Argo was wound up. According to Lohmann, VW took over around 100 people from Argo. Some worked for ADMT in the USA, the majority at the Munich location.
complex task
The history shows how difficult VW is with the topic of fully autonomous vehicles. According to Senger, there have been many optimistic announcements in the past, the schedules of which later turned out to be unrealistic. “That put us in a problematic situation.” Now they rely on realism.
Volkswagen is not alone with such problems. Many car companies’ early hopes of bringing fully autonomous cars onto the road in the near future have not been fulfilled. The technology is too complex and expensive, and the systems are too unreliable. Ford recently stated that it would focus on the development of level two driver assistance systems of the current classification, which only support the driver but do not replace it. Tesla’s autopilot is also struggling with serious problems.
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The industry’s greatest hopes for fully autonomous vehicles are therefore no longer in the market for private cars, but for van and taxi services. “The high development costs make this the next logical step,” believes Andreas Lauringer from the start-up Kontrol, which teaches autonomous driving systems traffic rules. There is an “enormous shortage of skilled workers for bus and truck drivers that can be solved by autonomous vehicles.”
Technology leaders are the robotaxi provider Waymo from the Google group and the General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Waymo taxis already operate in Phoenix and more recently in San Francisco without a human driver. In comparison, Volkswagen lags behind.
lagging behind Google and Co.
They hope to be able to catch up with Waymo and Co., according to VW. “It’s clear: we’re in a catching-up position,” said board member Senger. “But we have all the ingredients to quickly compete with the competition.”
When asked about the investment volume for the development efforts, Senger is silent. According to Handelsblatt information, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles is investing a single-digit billion amount in the development of autonomous driving systems.
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The delay compared to the competition is also related to the end of Argo AI. Originally, VW had high hopes for the joint venture with Ford: Argo was worth more than seven billion dollars at its peak and had over 2,000 employees. However, after entering the market in 2019, Argo didn’t progress as quickly as VW had hoped.
As Argo insiders reported to the Handelsblatt in the fall, Ford and VW would have had to bring in an additional $400 to $600 million to secure Argo’s next fiscal year. However, Ford in particular was no longer willing to do this. The Americans were significantly more successful in securing sought-after software experts from Argo: More than 500 employees accepted a corresponding takeover offer from Ford, while experts taken over by VW reported frustration.
It is now clear that VW lost valuable time with the Argo experiment. Virtually nothing is inherited from Argo’s autopilot software. The Argo skills are particularly helpful in the “operations area”, said Senger, i.e. only when setting up and operating the test vehicle fleet. The software and the chips, on the other hand, come first and foremost from the new partner Mobileye from Israel.
The gap is also evident when it comes to safety drivers. While Waymo is already doing away with human minders in the sunny city of Phoenix and now also in San Francisco, Volkswagen will not do without them until “at least 2026”. But that also shows how highly the safety of the passengers is rated, according to Senger.
When building the US fleet, VW relies on a different business model than in Germany. While the group wants to set up its own robotaxi service in Hamburg and Munich with the provider Moia, such an approach is not planned in the USA.
No parcel delivery trucks planned
“The US market is significantly more mature than that in Europe,” said Lohmann. The driving service providers Uber and Lyft are already on the road here with large fleets. “We want to make our vehicles available to such large transport service providers in the future.” It is hoped that Uber and Lyft could then integrate ID.Buzz vehicles into their fleets. A separate VW competitor offer would only do harm.
In addition to taxi services, fully autonomous buses are also conceivable in the transport sector, says Lohmann. The aim is not to target parcel delivery trucks like those that the US start-up Rivian is building for Amazon. The ID.Buzz is simply too small for that: “The size of our vehicles is ideal for supermarket, food and express deliveries.” They are already in talks with “many potential partners”, but cannot name any names yet. It is said that the first external curious people will be invited to Austin from September.
More: Mercedes Autopilot California allows “Drive Pilot”.