Volkswagen to invest $4 B to build digital businesses

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Volkswagen will invest 3.5 billion euros ($4 billion) by 2025 to build digital businesses and products including a cloud computing-based platform to connect vehicles and customers to offer services such as car sharing.

The German automaker said on Thursday it was working on a new software operating system, to be known as “vw.OS,” which will be introduced in VW brand electric cars from 2020 onwards.

These new vehicles will have a completely new electronic architecture designed to help facilitate autonomous driving functions, VW said in a statement.

Rather than having around 70 different sensors and controllers operating independently within in each vehicle, the new cars will connect the various sensors using the new proprietary software operating system.

This way, information gathered by a parking sensor could be linked to the steering, brakes, and high-definition maps, to allow a car to park itself once an onboard camera spots a free parking space.

VW said it was easier to do over-the-air software updates for cars if the operating system was designed in-house, rather than depending on thirdparty software supplied by the different vendors providing various sensors.

Volkswagen also said it would launch a carsharing business, called “We Share,” in Berlin using a fleet of 2,000 electric cars in the second quarter of 2019.

The We Share service will expand in core European markets as well as selected cities in the US and Canada, the carmaker said.