Mercedes and Bosch Join to Accelerate Rollout of Robo-Taxis

Mercedes and Bosch Join to Accelerate Rollout of Robo-Taxis

Mercedes and Bosch are teaming up to bring driverless taxis to city streets by early in the next decade in an intensifying global race to be first to offer the technology commercially, according to Bloomberg.

The world’s biggest luxury-car maker and the largest component producer are starting a six-year partnership to put robo-taxis on the road in least four locations, including Silicon Valley and their hometown of Stuttgart, Germany, said Bernhard Weidemann, a Daimler spokesman. The effort, which will let customers order the automated cars via smartphone, will compete with projects at BMW, Waymo and Uber.

Carmakers and new competitors like Uber are pouring billions into making vehicles smart enough to navigate streets on their own. At stake are new business opportunities estimated by Boston Consulting Group at $42 billion by 2025. The strategy is also a way for manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW to keep access to customers and avoid becoming lower-margin hardware suppliers to service providers.

Daimler’s move highlights the limits to the company’s willingness to share know-how to save costs. In 2015, BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen’s Audi division took the unprecedented step of jointly buying  Nokia’s HERE real-time maps unit for 2.8 billion euros. Since then, Daimler has snubbed BMW CEO Harald Krueger’s invitation to join an autonomous-cars alliance with chipmaker Intel and camera-software company Mobileye.