Samsung Ties Robot-Car Efforts Into Harman After $8 Billion Deal

Samsung is upping its $8 billion bet on automotive technology, forming a separate business unit within Harman to house autonomous driving products and plowing $300 million into a new fund investing in startups in the space, according to Bloomberg.

The autonomous driving unit will compete on everything from driving algorithms to systems integration, Dinesh Paliwal, Harman’s chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. That will include an advanced-driver assistance platform with open software that allows outside engineers to build products off of it, a shot at Mobileye, which was acquired by Intel this year in a move that mirrored Samsung’s automotive leap.

“Our industry is literally screaming, saying, ‘We love Mobileye but we need an open platform,“’ Paliwal said. “Competition is the best thing ever. The auto industry wants us to do it and we think we have the capacity and the fuel power.“

The South Korean company, which snapped up Harman last year for $8 billion to elbow its way into the market for automotive tech, is betting it can marry its consumer electronics expertise with Harman’s presence in dashboards all over the world. If it works, it will be able to offer carmakers a lightning-quick connected system for infotainment, mapping, concierge services and autonomous driving, without the competitive anxieties other tech giants like Apple or Google tend to arouse.

John Absmeier, vice president of smart machines for the Samsung Strategy & Innovation Center and former director of Delphi Automotive Plc’s autonomous vehicle project in Silicon Valley, will lead the new unit. To further access to new tech, Samsung is also creating a fund to invest in an array of technologies needed to enable self-driving and connected cars, from sensors and machine vision to artificial intelligence and security.