(From L-R) Jim Hackett, president and chief executive officer, Ford Motor Company, Bryan Salesky, chief executive officer and co-founder of Argo AI LLC and Herbert Diess, chief executive officer, Volkswagen Group, pose for a picture ahead of a press conference July 12, 2019 in New York City.Johannes Eisele / Getty Volkswagen and Ford will cooperate on electric and self-driving car technology, sharing costs on a global scale to take a major step forward in the industrys disruptive transformation.VW will invest US$2.6 billion in Fords autonomous-car partner Argo AI in a deal that values the operation at more than US$7 billion, the two manufacturers said Friday in a joint statement in New York.This includes US$1 billion in funding and VW contributing its Audi US$1.6-billion Autonomous Intelligent Driving unit.While Ford and Volkswagen remain independent and fiercely competitive in the marketplace, teaming up and working with Argo AI on this important technology allows us to deliver unmatched capability, scale and geographic reach, Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett said.Unprecedented shifts facing the auto industry are forcing players to consider new partnerships and potential consolidation. VW, the worlds top automaker, offers the industrys most ambitious roll-out of electric models, while Ford, also in the top 10, is developing advanced self-driving technology with Argo.For VW, the Argo investment offers an opportunity to potentially catch up with Alphabet Inc.s Waymo, and General Motorss Cruise unit. Road tests and accumulating huge amounts of data are critical for the further development of self-driving cars, and few apart from Waymo are equipped to do it alone.It took a while to get this deal done, but its because we actually sorted out a lot of the hard problems, Bryan Salesky, Argo AIs co-founder and CEO, said in an interview. We have a clear line of sight to production, vehicle supply and we have clear line of sight to where we want to go to market and how. Besides sharing costs for the development of self-driving cars, Ford will use VWs electric-car underpinnings to form the backbone of the most aggressive rollout of electric cars in the industry, with Volkswagen spending some 30 billion euros (US$34 billion). Adding more vehicles to production lines would help gain scale and save costs, and offer Ford a platform to better comply with tougher rules on carbon-dioxide emissions in Europe.Ford will build at least one mass-market battery car in Europe starting in 2023 and deliver more than 600,000 European vehicles based on VWs platform, dubbed MEB, over six years. A second electric model for Europe is under discussion.Teaming up with its U.S. peer is one of the key initiatives of VW Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess to overhaul the German industrial giant. Both sides reiterated on Friday the tie-up does not include entering equity ties between Ford and
Origin: VW will invest US$2.6 billion in Ford’s self-driving arm, deepening partnership