For Volvo Cars, which is aggressive in the electrification transition, the need to develop smart cars is clearly just as urgent.
On the evening of December 19, Beijing NavInfo Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "NavInfo") announced that the company and Volvo Cars signed a cooperation agreement related to autonomous driving.
According to the agreement, in the next three years, NavInfo will build an environment for Volvo Cars' autonomous driving function development and verification platform, and provide it with collection, processing and compliance services for automatic driving related data.
According to the data, NavInfo is a provider of new positioning digital map content, Internet of Vehicles and dynamic traffic information services, and location-related business intelligence solutions. Previously, it has received orders from mainstream auto companies such as BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Ford, SAIC, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, and Peugeot, and has also cooperated with Internet companies such as Huawei and Didi in autonomous driving.
This is not the first time that the two have worked together, since volvo and NavInfo have reached a number of cooperation agreements. According to the announcement, in addition to the field of automatic driving, NavInfo will also provide Volvo with high-precision map products and compliance services for the Internet of Vehicles cloud service platform, and the contract period is three years. It is not difficult to see that Volvo seems to be focusing on improving the level of intelligence and the development of autonomous driving technology.
The Volvo brand's research on autonomous driving is not too late. As early as 2005, Volvo set up its autonomous driving division. Since then, its autonomous driving has been divided into two lines: advanced automatic driving and assisted driving, in 2014, Volvo released the L2 level Pilot Assist system, and in 2017, Volvo announced the launch of the world's first live autonomous driving Drive Me test project.
The car company, which aims to transform into a pure electric luxury brand by 2030, has no small ambitions for autonomous driving. In June 2018, Volvo Car Group CEO Hkan Samuelsson said in a statement that it expected that by 2025, a third of volvo car brand annual sales would be self-driving cars. Hanken Samuelson also revealed that this plan may be based on the launch of "robo-taxis" to operate in major automotive markets such as Europe, China and the United States.
To achieve this, Volvo has made a series of investments and partnerships in the time that followed. In 2018, Volvo made a strategic investment in LiDAR company Luminar. In the same year, Volvo and Baidu reached a cooperation to develop an L4-level self-driving car in the Chinese market. In 2019, Volvo announced the launch of a second-generation self-driving car in conjunction with Uber. In April 2021, Volvo announced the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement with Didi Chuxing's autonomous driving company, which will cooperate on autonomous driving test fleets.
However, Volvo's many cooperation has also encountered many twists and turns, Uber's autonomous driving department sold at the end of 2020 due to excessive losses, which will inevitably affect the cooperation with Volvo, and the L4 self-driving car developed in cooperation with Baidu has not yet had too much process.
In a series of collaborations, Volvo has also accelerated the landing of self-driving models, and in May last year, Volvo Cars said that it will equip the next generation of self-driving cars with Luminar lidar technology derived from Silicon Valley startups, and the new cars will be sold to consumers in 2022, promoting the mass production of Volvo's safe self-driving cars.
At present, 2021 has come to an end, and it is getting closer and closer to Volvo's 2022 lidar landing goal, and the time planned for self-driving cars to account for one-third of annual sales in 2025 is not too much. Judging from the current close cooperation of Volvo, the outside world can feel the urgency of Volvo.
At present, the rapid development of autonomous driving technology, there are car companies announcing the realization of L4 level and higher level of automatic driving level, so in this context, whether from the internal or external perspective, Volvo may face a lot of pressure to enter early.