Volvo Car Group, including its strategic affiliates Polestar and Lynk & Co. International, has announced a strategic partnership with Waymo, which will be the exclusive L4 autonomous driving tech partner for Volvo Car Group. The two will first work together to use Waymo’s fully self-driving technology – the Waymo Driver – for a new electric vehicle platform for ride-hailing services. Volvo is now the fourth car manufacturer which will employ Waymo’s AV technology in its vehicles. Volvo has plans to roll out a number of electric vehicles in the next few years, including the XC40 Recharge and the Polestar 2.
Fully autonomous vehicles have the potential to improve road safety to previously unseen levels and to revolutionise the way people live, work and travel,” Henrik Green, Chief Technology Officer at Volvo Car Group, said.
A global partnership with Waymo opens up new and exciting business opportunities for Volvo Cars, Polestar and Lynk & Co, he added.
Partnership with Volvo Car Group helps pave the path to the deployment of the Waymo Driver abroad in years to come and represents an important milestone in the highly competitive autonomous vehicle industry, Waymo Chief Automotive Officer Adam Frost said.
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Volvo had an agreement with Uber for self-driving taxis to be introduced by 2019, however, the plan had to be scrapped since an Uber test vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2017. Last year, the two companies unveiled a jointly-developed self-driving version of the Volvo XC90 SUV.
Volvo is also working on partially-automated vehicles with LIDAR made by US startup Luminar. The Swedish automaker has that these vehicles will be able to drive on their own on highways without human intervention, promising to roll them out in 2022.
