Volkswagen Group is undertaking the world’s largest industrial reshuffle for the electric-vehicle age, planning half a dozen battery plants just in Europe and retooling assembly lines around the globe. But its CEO sees autonomous-driving technology bringing about an even bigger shift.
“The car becomes so different when it’s driving autonomously. This change will transform the industry more than EVs or the electrification does,” VW Group CEO Herbert Diess said in an interview for Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum last week.
Diess’ view may be shocking, given the company’s (and industry’s) efforts to go electric, and the level of disillusionment that has set in for autonomous-vehicle technology despite industry investing billions of every currency—development is taking much longer than expected (and promoted).
Diess says VW’s joint AV efforts with Ford are making good progress, but an autonomous vehicle is “the most sophisticated internet device you can imagine”—they need 10 times more lines of code than a smartphone and three times more than a jet plane.
VW announced plans last month to introduce an ID.Buzz microbus EV with L4 autonomous driving in 2025, with tests starting in Hamburg this year. VW is spending about €2.5bn a year on boosting its software capabilities. Although Diess acknowledges there is still a long way to go to turn Europe’s largest automaker into a software powerhouse, he says “We’re in quite a good position to remain a very strong player in this future automotive world, in ‘new auto,’ as we call it”.
