VW’s software offensive
Don’t mess, just plop
VW: Autonomous Driving in Portimao
© press-inform – the press office
The Volkswagen group is betting everything on the Cariad card. The software development company is set to catapult Europe’s largest carmaker to the top in autonomous driving. Failure of this plan would have fatal consequences.
Don’t mess, just plop! That was the VW motto for decades. That meant nothing else than not always jumping on a development train first, but when you decided on a technology, you put it into practice with full commitment. But this idea of the “Fast Follower” worked in times of mechanical engineering, when infotainment was little more than a permanently installed navigation system, Bluetooth and a few driver assistants. With the VW Golf 6 and its group brothers, it was primarily important that the joints are narrow and the processing quality is high. The technology should be as modern as necessary and as robust as possible.
In the 2020 decade, this recipe for success is no longer quite sufficient. The cars are turning into rolling multimedia boxes, which, like computers, are developing faster and faster. There is also autonomous driving. Here the second is already the first loser. To claim that the Lower Saxony slept through this trend does not do justice to the Wolfsburg managers. A few years ago, Volkswagen initiated a tech alliance with the aim of getting robo-cars on the road as quickly as possible. In addition, they went into cooperation with Mobileye, bought the map service Navteq together with Daimler and BMW and turned it into Here. This billion-dollar investment also received applause from across the industry, because cars need extremely precise maps to drive automatically. Anyone who does not have this will almost inevitably become a hardware supplier for map services such as Google Maps and development companies such as Waymo, which also belongs to the Google umbrella group Alphabet.
It is precisely this scenario that they want to prevent in Wolfsburg. That is why one remembered old strengths and approaches. In plain language. The ADAS systems (Advanced Driver Assistance System) and infotainment are also being padded again. Under the supervision of Audi, the software company Cariad was founded in July 2020 in order to make the leap to the top of technology with a group-wide effort. But the VW subsidiary is not alone in this. So a global war has broken out for the most capable software and hardware developers. The VW subsidiary has now hired the 1,000 software engineer. Lara-Marie Volkmann will work on autonomous driving systems.
For comparison: Tesla boss Elon Musk has told the US technology site “CleanTechnica” that “the Tesla autopilot is the result of the work of 300 extremely talented engineers”. So class instead of mass. That does not change the fact that the Americans are still vigorously recruiting. Also for the Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide. “The ADAS test engineer is to test the autopilot firmware to ensure compliance with the regulations for the vehicle in the local markets,” said a job posting from the US automaker.
The goals of the VW Group remain ambitious: By 2026 at the latest, level 3 autonomous driving should be possible and more. The beginning is the Artemis project, an efficient electric Audi “Artemis comes onto the market with level 3 capabilities, but has level 4 in its gut”, announced Cariad CEO Dirk Hilgenberg. However, even with the future-oriented software developers, the competence wrangling of the old corporate world is inevitable. Artemis boss Alex Hitzinger has since left the company. At your own request, as it is called. Hitzinger and his team had pushed the Artemis project forward, even outside of the established corporate structures. Obviously, the time of freestyle acting is over. Corporate reasons still rule and extra tours are not welcome. Too much is at stake. It is quite possible that Hitzinger did not particularly like the command “Back into the limb”.
The burden that rests on the shoulders of the Cariad employees is a great one. In addition to Artemis, the subsidiaries are also driving the Apollon and Trinity projects. Next year, the Premium Platform Electronic (PPE), which is the result of a collaboration between Audi and Porsche, will bring dynamic wind to the VW Group’s electric fleet. From the middle of the decade, all models will then be on the “Scalable System Platform” (SSP), which – as the name suggests – will be extremely scalable.
Much depends on the success of Cariad. Failure would be fatal for the Volkswagen Group. Because the total of 4,500 employees also work on infotainment systems “In the future there will be constant updates, maybe even weekly”; says Audi boss Markus Duesmann. The work on new operating systems is already in full swing: VW OS 1.2 is to come into cars in 2022/23, the big step VW OS 2.0 then together with the autonomous driving functions in 2025. But VW has with the American start up Argo AI, in which the automaker has invested billions, has another trump card in its pocket.