A subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group in the field of automotive software development, CARIAD officially cooperates with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. in the development of autonomous cars.
CARIAD will use a hardware platform called Snapdragon Ride™ from the company codenamed QCOM, which incidentally has been around for a long time and often appears prominently on the specification pages of various smartphones and telecommunication devices.
CARIAD CEO Dirk Hilgenberg said Qualcomm was chosen as a supplier partner for systems-on-chips (SoCs) taking into account his experience as a specialist in the high-performance semiconductor industry.
In addition, the device made by Qualcomm is considered suitable and in accordance with the characteristics of the system made in order to build driving assistant technology and automatic steering for future Volkswagen products, which will even be targeted to Level 4, aka high-driving automation technology.
“The collaboration between our system and Qualcomm’s high-performance SoC will be the perfect match to bring an automated driving experience to our customers around the world,” said Dirk in an official statement, Tuesday (3/5/2022).
Klaus Hofmockel, CARIAD Senior Vice President of Hardware Development added further that the partnership with Qualcomm is the answer to our quest for the best balance between scalability, cost and performance.
“Qualcomm hardware is so scalable for us. Mainly because it is able to achieve the performance we need, but still able to achieve a combination of energy efficiency with cost effectiveness,” he said.
According to him, the partnership with Qualcomm will be a gateway to strengthen the competence of the Volkswagen Group in the competition for autonomous car development.
Because, software and hardware must really match and continue to be built together, in order to achieve perfection. To be precise, it is a matter of the best performance, as well as long-term efficiency in the vehicle system, especially for complex functions such as the Level 4 automatic steering feature.
Moreover, Volkswagen Group boss Herbert Diess himself has ambitions not only to launch an all-automatic vehicle, but also to be sustainable. Starting from producing their own batteries, touching electric vehicle energy services, to carrying out a system in a vehicle that can be continuously updated.
This is the purpose of building CARIAD, which has more than 5,000 developers and engineers worldwide, for the comprehensive development of Volkswagen’s future automotive products. Starting from entertainment platforms, electric-based vehicle infrastructure, autonomous driving features, to cloud ecosystems and digital services directly from inside the vehicle.
Nakul Duggal, Senior Vice president & GM Automotive at Qualcomm believes that collaboration with the Volkswagen Group will take autonomous car development to a higher level, more scalable and secure.
“As the number of innovations and the complexity of automated driving features increases, a strong collaboration like ours with CARIAD is a must. Not only to compete to overcome time-to-market challenges, but also to be able to move towards a safe and reliable autonomous driving experience for everyone, ” he explained.
