Volvo Cars and Veoneer have announced that Zenuity, the joint venture between the two companies, will be split into two parts in order to accelerate self-driving car development.
Previously, Zenuity was making assisted and autonomous driving software and one part of the venture will be a new standalone company owned by Volvo, focusing on the development and commercialization of unsupervised autonomous drive software.
The second part of the venture will be integrated into Veoneer and will focus on the development and commercialization of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
As part of the agreement, Zenuity’s operations and people based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Shanghai, China, will be transferred to the new company owned by Volvo. The operations and people based in Germany and the U.S. will be transferred to Veoneer.
Volvo will focus on unsupervised autonomous drive software that will be introduced in the next generation of cars based on Volvo’s SPA2 vehicle architecture.
“The new company will develop safe and advanced autonomous drive software,” said Dennis Nobelius, Zenuity’s chief executive. “We believe that in the future there will only be a limited number of global software platforms for autonomous driving. We intend to develop one of these winning platforms."
Before splitting the company in two parts, Zenuity was a 50/50 joint venture developing a strong software platform for ADAS and self-driving cars, both of which will continue to be built and further developed inside the parent companies.
The new company is expected to become operational in the third quarter of this year.
