According to insiders, Volkswagen wants to expand its cooperation with Mobileye after withdrawing from the Argo AI startup for robot cars. It boils down to the subsidiary of the Intel group as a partner, said a person familiar with the plans from the Reuters news agency on Thursday.

Mobileye, which already cooperates with VW's software unit Cariad on autonomous driving, is likely to be the automaker's partner for a robotaxi service.

VW is in advanced negotiations with a partner that will provide the self-driving system for the ID Buzz vehicles, the spokesperson said. "We will announce that partner shortly," the spokesperson said.

The new partner is already testing ID Buzz prototypes on the road. "This is not something we just started, but we are already in the testing with this company and cooperating with them," the spokesperson said.

VW Commercial Vehicles will continue to be responsible within VW Group for introducing self-driving vehicles for mobility services with the new partner.

Cariad is developing partially and highly automated driving functions for VW Group's passenger car brands, partnering with Horizon Robotics in China and Robert Bosch in the rest of the world.

VW Group also has partnership with Qualcomm for high-performance chips for automated driving.

earnings call
- Ford has deployed BlueCruise on many vehicles across hundreds of thousands of Blue zone miles. We have strong technology partners working alongside us. And now, we’re going to bring in several hundred people from Argo, a brilliant collection of minds, who’ve done a great job, who have done wonderful work in the L4 space, but their job and mission now is to help us create a differentiated Level 3 BlueCruise system.

- strategic decision shift ... to internally develop L2+/L3 technology.

- But the biggest factor is our growing confidence in our talent, both the Argo talent and the team at Ford that Doug is building.

Doug Field
... this is going to be a really tough problem to solve. It’s the toughest problem of our generation. And I don’t think about it as capital constraints nearly as much as talent constraints. In the kind of projects that we are diving into at Ford and the kind of work that we’re doing, the constraint really becomes how many of the world’s best people can you get working on a problem. And that’s really the decision, in many ways, that is driving what we’re doing here at Argo is we are deeply passionate about the L3 mission. We have ideas of how it can work and how customers can interact with it that are really exciting, particularly when you add them to our next-generation EVs. So, this is the way we want to use that talent.

We are not going to ignore the capabilities of suppliers that can provide value in our L3 solution. They are great manufacturers of components of systems, such as imaging sensors and radar, and we’ll take advantage of that. But we will have a core team that can integrate a system, understand its performance at the system level, and we will own the software. It is really important that we also own the connection to these vehicles. L3 is a connected technology. So, the ability to have a pipeline that collects data and makes the system better and better, we must own that. Finally, the customer experience, how the customer moves in and out of autonomous operation, that’s a problem that actually doesn’t exist in L4 and is a huge opportunity for us to create a Ford experience that’s really unique. So, those are the areas that we will absolutely develop great capability in-house and focus on in the L3 development.