OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
INDUSTRY UPDATE
October 2016
McIlvaine Company
The Swedish car company is in the process of opening a
research center in Mountain View, Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo’s U.S.
division, said in an interview. The company is hiring some 70 engineers for the
office, he said. “We’re moving in as we speak.”
Volvo, which is owned by Chinese automaker Geely but operates
largely independently, has had an office in Camarillo for about 30 years that
focused on car design, Kerssemakers said. Within the past three to four years,
engineers based in that office also started to work on car infotainment systems,
he said. Those engineers frequently have been traveling to the Bay Area to
collaborate with tech firms here.
Lex Kerssemakers, the CEO of Volvo’s U.S. division, says the
automaker’s engineers worked closely with Apple to integrate CarPlay into a new
infotainment system in its XC90 sport utility vehicle. (Laura A. Oda/Bay Area
News Group)
Among those was Apple. Volvo engineers worked closely with the
iPhone maker to integrate CarPlay into a new infotainment system in its XC90
sport utility vehicle, Kerssemakers said. That experience, plus a recently
announced joint venture agreement with Uber to develop self-driving cars,
convinced Volvo to set up shop in the Bay Area.
The new office “is literally based on the success we’ve had in
the last two or three years working together with companies here in the Bay
Area,” he said.
Engineers in the new center will focus on electric car
technology, infotainment systems and autonomous vehicle research.
Volvo is the latest car company to open a research center in
Silicon Valley. General Motors, Volkswagen, BMW and others have operated in the
area for years. Ford was a latecomer when it opened up a small office in 2012,
but it later grew that presence to more than 100 people.
A large and growing proportion of a car’s value is tied up in
the software that underlies its various systems, said Brian Brennan, a senior
vice president of Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a trade organization for the
area. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicles are considered to be the cars of the
future, and Silicon Valley is ground zero for both the software industry and
autonomous vehicle research, he said.
The automakers realize that by opening offices in the Bay Area
and tapping into the research and development already going on here, they “get a
little closer to controlling their destinies,” Brennan said. “This is where the
artificial intelligence and the software is being generated.”
Volvo’s Mountain View office will join its research centers in
Shanghai and Gothenburg, Sweden. The Mountain View office will take the lead on
electric car and infotainment research.
But which research office will focus on specific research
areas will vary from project to project, Kerssemakers said. For example, Volvo
already has an ongoing autonomous vehicle research project in the works in
Gothenburg.
McIlvaine Company
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