Autonomous fleets: VW teams up with Aurora

Volkswagen enters into a strategic partnership with Aurora, an U.S. start-up founded by Google’s long-time car guru Chris Urmson and former Tesla manager Sterling Anderson. Both partners seek to bring autonomous EVs to cities as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) fleets.

In the last months, specialists of VW, of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab at Stanford University and Aurora worked already intensively together to integrate Aurora’s self-driving system in platforms of the VW group.

Already for some time, the German carmaker works on a Self-Driving System (SDS) for different product categories such as fully self-driving pods, shuttles, delivery vans or trucks without a cabin. Chief Digital Officer Johann Jungwirth states: “Our vision is ‘Mobility for all, at the push of a button’. This means that we want to offer mobility for all people around the world.” Aurora benefits from the deal through the perspective of bringing self-driving vehicles to market at scale: “Our priority at Aurora is to make self-driving cars a reality quickly, broadly and safely, and we know we will get there faster by partnering with innovative automakers like the Volkswagen Group”, says Chris Urmson, CEO of Aurora.
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