Volvo Cars accelerates AV tech

Volvo Cars has established a new business entity called Zenuity to develop unsupervised autonomous vehicle (AV) driving technology.

The assisted and autonomous driving software development company, expected to be operational during the third quarter of this year, will be split into two parts.

One is a new stand-alone company, focusing on the development and commercialisation of unsupervised autonomous drive software, and will be owned by Volvo Cars.

The second part will focus on the continued development and commercialisation of advanced driver assistance systems and will be integrated into Veoneer, the automotive safety equipment company.

Zenuity is a 50-50 joint venture between Volvo Cars and Veoneer.

As part of the agreement, Zenuity’s operations and people based in Gothenburg, Sweden and Shanghai, China will be transferred to the new company to be owned by Volvo Cars.

The operations and people based in Germany and the USA will be transferred to Veoneer.

Volvo Cars’ part of Zenuity will focus on development of unsupervised autonomous drive software to be introduced in the next generation of cars based on Volvo’s SPA2 vehicle architecture. The new company will remain separate from Volvo Cars and run its own distribution channels.

“Volvo Cars is committed to introduce safe, unsupervised autonomous drive on highways with its next generation of cars,” Volvo Cars chief executive Håkan Samuelsson says.

“Allowing the new company to fully focus on this development will help us deliver on those ambitions.”

Zenuity chief executive Dennis Nobelius says the new company will develop safe and advanced autonomous drive software.

“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.”