Volkswagen bought virtually 50 percent as a lot of electric vehicles as Tesla in 2020. Sean Gallup/Getty Illustrations or photos

While Tesla’s highly-priced and strictly in-residence formulated autonomous driving software program has a extended way to go to basically attain self-driving, its German rival Volkswagen is heading down the similar route to create its have driverless abilities.

In an job interview German newspaper Handelsblatt this 7 days, Volkswagen Team CEO Herbert Diess stated the car large options to layout and establish its personal chips and application for potential autonomous automobiles.

“To attain exceptional general performance in light-weight of the superior demands that exist for cars and trucks, software package and components have to appear out of a person hand,” Diess explained to the newspaper, Reuters first reported Friday.

The task will tumble less than Volkswagen’s software program unit Cariad. Volkswagen doesn’t strategy to manufacture semiconductors but wants to individual patents if doable, Diess added.

Volkswagen is one of Tesla’s greatest competitors in the worldwide electrical automobile marketplace. Although entering the area substantially later than Tesla, Volkswagen has been gaining significant traction in the mass EV market place in latest many years with reasonably priced offerings this kind of as the well-liked VW ID.3, Audi E-Tron and VW e-Golf.

In 2020, Volkswagen Team marketed 231,600 electrical vehicles globally, almost 50 percent as several as Tesla. Diving into autonomous driving is a natural step for Volkswagen, regardless of the car industry’s confined good results with the nascent technologies.

“I think [self-driving] is just one of the most difficult technical challenges that exists, that is possibly ever existed,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said for the duration of Tesla’s to start with-quarter earnings phone on Monday. “And definitely, in order to address it, we mainly need to clear up a fairly substantial element of synthetic intelligence, specially real-world synthetic intelligence.”

With his head still fixated on the trouble by Thursday, the Tesla CEO tweeted, “A main component of serious-globe AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized comprehensive self-driving operate, as the overall program is built for biological neural nets with optical imagers.”

Volkswagen is also acutely informed of the likely risk from Apple, which is rumored to be performing on its own electrical autonomous cars. 

“Apple and Tesla have increased competence in phrases of how semiconductors are defined,” Diess told Handelsblatt.

Volkswagen Will Develop In-House Self-Driving Chip to Compete With Tesla, Apple

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