The base vehicles will be manufactured by Volvo Cars and then purchased from Volvo by Uber. Volvo Cars and Uber are contributing a combined $300 million to the project. Both Uber and Volvo will use the same base vehicle for the next stage of their own autonomous car strategies.
Uber will add its own self-developed autonomous driving systems to the Volvo base vehicle and the Swedish company will use the same base vehicle for the next stage of its own autonomous car strategy, which will involve fully autonomous driving.
Volvo DriveME Technology
Hakan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars, said: "We are very proud to be the partner of choice for Uber, one of the world's leading technology companies. This alliance places Volvo at the heart of the current technological revolution in the automotive industry."
The new base vehicle will be developed on Volvo's fully modular Scalable Product Architecture (SPA), the same platform on which the the XC90 SUV, S90 sedan and the V90 estate are built on.
Volvo Autonomous Car Interface
The development work will be conducted by engineers from Volvo and Uber engineers in close collaboration. This project will further add to the scalability of the SPA platform to include all needed safety, redundancy and new features required to have autonomous vehicles on the road.
With this announcement, the autonomous ride-sharing industry gets even more crowded. We've already read about Ford planning to enter the autonomous vehicle field for ride-sharing fleets by 2021, and GM has teamed up with Lyft to develop self-driving cars. So, it's great to see so many players enter this segment and we can't wait to see a production ready car soon.
