In 2017, the agreement established between Daimler and Bosch was to develop hardware and software for autonomous vehicles, with the ultimate goal of putting robot taxis into circulation in an urban environment at the beginning of this decade.
The partnership between the two companies, whose project was named Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom, civilization, arts, justice and skill), is now coming to an end without practical results, according to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Both Daimler and Bosch will now separately pursue the development of technologies for autonomous vehicles.
This is surprising news, when we see several partnerships being announced for the development of autonomous vehicles (level 4 and 5) and also for putting robot taxis into service, creating new business units associated with mobility.
The Volkswagen Group, through its subsidiary Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles and in partnership with Argo, announced its intention to put the first robot taxis into circulation in the city of Munich, Germany, in 2025. Tesla had also announced that it would have robot taxis to circulate… in 2020 — the deadlines set by Elon Musk proving, once again, optimistic.
Companies like Waymo and Cruise already have several test prototypes in circulation in some North American cities, although, for now, they have a human driver present in this test phase. Meanwhile in China, Baidu has already put its first robot taxi service into operation.
"The challenge is greater than many would have thought"
The reasons behind the decision by Daimler and Bosch remain unjustified, but according to internal sources, the cooperation between the two was “over” for some time. We had already seen the relocation of several employees in other work groups or tasks, outside the scope of the partnership.
Harald Kröger, managing director of Bosch, in statements to the German newspaper says that for them "it's just a transition to the next phase", adding that "they will continue to accelerate deeply compared to highly automated driving".
However, perhaps giving clues as to why this partnership ended, Kröger admits that the challenge of developing robot taxis to handle traffic in the city is “greater than many would have thought”.
He sees autonomous driving functions first coming into series production in other areas, for example in logistics or in car parks, where cars can, by themselves, look for a place and park by themselves — interestingly, a pilot project should go into operation this year at Stuttgart airport, in a parallel partnership between Bosch and… Daimler.
On the Daimler side, it is already the second partnership related to autonomous driving that does not reach a good port. The German company had already signed an agreement with archrival BMW for the development of algorithms related to autonomous driving, but at level 3 and outside the urban grid and not at level 4 and 5 as with Bosch. But this partnership was also ended in 2020.