Volkswagen, which owns brands such as Audi and Porsche, is
working on both self-driving cars for the future and driver-assistance features
such as adaptive cruise control in current vehicles. But the company's brand
had been developing those features independently.
Last year, Volkswagen consolidated some of those development
efforts into a subsidiary called Car.Software to better coordinate among the
makers, with each company handling its own work around the look and feel of the
software while collaborating on core safety functions such as detecting
obstacles.
But the various companies inside the group were still using
different systems to develop that software, and the deal announced Thursday
will put them on a common cloud provider, Dirk Hilgenberg, chief executive of
Car.Software, told Reuters in an interview.
The Microsoft deal will also make deploying software updates
to add new features to cars - a practice that helped set Tesla apart from many
rivals early on - much easier.
Volkswagen in 2018 inked a deal with Microsoft to connect
its cars to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. The Thursday deal means
that the software updates will be developed on the same cloud that will then
beam those updates down to the cars.
"Over-the-air updates are paramount," Hilgenberg
said. "This functionality needs to be there. If you can't do it, you will
lose ground."
In practical terms, the deal means that cars that initially
hit the road with a few driver-assistance features today could add new
capabilities over time that bring them closer to autonomous driving, said Scott
Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence at
Microsoft.
"For our phones 15 or 20 years ago, when you bought it,
it pretty much never changed. Now, we expected every week or every couple of
days that, silently, there's new features," Guthrie told Reuters in an
interview. "That ability to start to programme the vehicle in richer and
richer ways, and in a safe way, transforms how the experience works."
0 comments:
Post a Comment