VW, 4 suppliers team up to push common autonomous driving tech

The group, calling itself the Networking for Autonomous Vehicles Alliance, will dive into a number of unglamorous tasks such as improving the composition of electrical wiring to enable vehicles to transmit larger volumes of data.

The supplier members are the Silicon Valley companies Aquantia Corp. and Nvidia; and two Germany parts giants, Robert Bosch GmbH and Continental AG.

The alliance hopes to attract other automakers and suppliers to the effort.

Standardization

The global auto industry already is well into the work of developing autonomous vehicles, and early stages of the technology have made their way into dealer showrooms.

But there is a growing concern that there is no standard path for the technology, and that automakers will face enormous costs in producing technical solutions in isolation from other automakers.