Automobile

Bloomberg As Ford Motor Co bears down on a self-imposed deadline to field robotaxis and driverless delivery vehicles in two years, the automaker has acquired a small defense contractor whose experience could help get auto-piloted cars on the road. Ford paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Quantum Signal AI, a 40-member team of roboticists operating out of a decommissioned 1930s-era ...

Bloomberg Toyota Motor Corp will lead $3.6 billion in investments that global carmakers have pledged to plow into Indonesia’s electric-vehicle programme in the next five years, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto said. The Japanese carmaker’s commitment — it plans to spend $2 billion to build hybrid vehicle plants in Southeast Asia’s largest car market — will help the country triple its ...

Bloomberg Tech-giant Tencent Holdings will partner with BMW to help develop self-driving vehicles in China. The pair began collaborating on what they called BMW Group China High Performance D3 Platform, which is scheduled to begin operations by the end of the year. Tencent operates one of the largest cloud platforms in China, providing services from data storage to online computing. ...

Bloomberg Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co will cooperate on electric and self-driving car technology, sharing costs on a global scale to take a major step forward in the industry’s disruptive transformation. VW will invest $2.6 billion in Ford’s autonomous-car partner Argo AI in a deal that values the operation at more than $7 billion, the two manufacturers said in ...

Bloomberg BMW AG and Daimler AG will offer cars capable of navigating on highways by themselves starting in 2024, as the luxury-car rivals cooperate to speed up the development of autonomous vehicles. They plan to sell cars equipped with so-called Level 4 self-driving technology, meaning the vehicles could manage motorway driving and parking without intervention from the driver, who will ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co is preparing to make a bigger push in electric vehicles (EV), according to Morgan Stanley. The company doesn’t currently offer any electric cars although it has been heavily investing in such technology. The carmaker’s ongoing discussions with Volkswagen AG promise to take its electric-car ambitions “to the next level,” analysts led by Adam Jonas wrote in ...

Bloomberg China’s policies to boost its fledgling hydrogen-powered auto industry are coming at just the right time for entrepreneur and former carmaker executive Wang Chaoyun. His startup, Anhui Mingtian Hydrogen Energy Technology Co, makes fuel-cell stacks for vehicles propelled by the element, which produces no emissions from the tailpipe. During Mingtian Hydrogen’s brief existence, the fuel-cell vehicle industry has received ...

Bloomberg Walmart Inc came to dominate retailing through its mastery of logistics—the complicated choreography of getting goods from farm or factory to the consumer. But even the world’s biggest store doesn’t make money selling its wares online in the US, largely due to runaway shipping costs. So Walmart is turning to robots. Earlier this month, Walmart’s US chief Greg Foran ...

Bloomberg Waymo LLC agreed to explore driverless services with Renault SA, Nissan Motor Co and Mitsubishi Motors Corp, pairing a leader in self-driving technology with the world’s largest automotive alliance. The three carmakers and Alphabet Inc’s autonomous-vehicle unit will study market opportunities and research legal and safety issues related to driverless transportation services in France and Japan, the companies said ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc is preparing to buy startup Drive.ai in a small deal that will bring more engineers with experience in autonomous vehicle technology to the iPhone maker, according to people familiar with the matter. It’s unclear how much Apple is paying. Drive.ai has raised about $77 million in funding since it was founded in 2015, and was valued at ...