German car manufacturer Volkswagen is joining hands with other car brands in order to develop its own car of the future.
According to Christian Senger, the board member responsible for digital services and software explained to Reuters that there is a competition to create automative operating systems and noted the growing presence of non-automative industries in the field as noted by The Economic Times.
Carmakers have been forced to link up radar, camera and ultrasonic sensors and connect them to braking and steering components, something which requires thousands of lines of software code as driving becomes more and more automatic.
Another board member of Volkswagen who goes by Thomas Ulbrich said that the company is 10 years behind Tesla in terms of electric vehicles and the vehicle operating systems.
Senger mentioned the possibility of "fewer automotive operating systems than carmakers".
In a slideshow presentation, he began to emphasize the need to transform the way the company used to do things; from just writing specifications to an industry with skills, employees and talents who would wish to develop more software programs on their own that tailors to the requirements of innovative software development as noted by Electrek.
Joining Hands to Build the O.S.
At the start of the year, the German car manufacturer launched Car.Software, an independent unit responsible for developing lines of code.
Although it has 3,000 digital experts onboard with the project, the company wants that number to increase threefold in the next five years as building this came at a whopping expense of almost $8 billion.
In a joint effort to develop its own software instead of basing it on a rival's software to test other carmakers on their willingness to go onboard with the project, there have been multiple inquiries from carmaking companies.
"The operating system is not something that we will control on our own. We will define its core and then quickly include open-source components, to create standards. This will create opportunities for partnerships," Senger added as noted by Channel News Asia.
In the Q&A, Senger highlighted that the cars too will always be updated thanks to the automative cloud which Volkswagen will be bringing online within the year.
"We have successfully developed the technological base for the MEB and the end-to-end connection for data exchange between vehicle and cloud. Right now, we are developing additional customer-centered functions. The start is pure tactical data exchange." said Senger.
