ZF Teams up with e GO Mobile to Make and Sell Autonomous Vehicles

ZF has set up a new joint venture with e GO Mobile AG with a view to develop, make and sell autonomous people and cargo movers. Autonomous electromobility will pave the way towards making traffic in metropolitan areas cleaner, safer and more efficient. ZF entered into the joint venture through its subsidiary Zukunft Ventures. The new joint venture will be named e.GO Moove and will be based in Aachen. It will be engaged in the development, production and sale of autonomous people and cargo movers. The company’s first prototype was recently presented on the campus of RWTH Aachen University.

Commenting on the joint venture, Dr. Stefan Sommer, CEO of ZF Friedrichshafen AG said that autonomous, connected and highly flexible e-shuttle vehicles will significantly promote mobility in urban and metropolitan areas in the future as they offer users a safe, comfortable, efficient and environmentally-friendly mode. He added that these vehicles would take ZF one step closer to its Vision Zero.

ZF is a major automotive supplier of electrified drivelines, which will underpin ZF’s commitment to the new joint venture company e.GO Moove, as the company’s drivetrains are known for their durability, economy and a high level of efficiency. ZF will also make its ADAS, chassis and sensor fusion technologies available to the joint venture company. The scalable supercomputing control box ZF ProAI will play a central role as an integrated vehicle system that can be updated in the cloud. The control box uses artificial intelligence algorithms for vehicle-to-infrastructure applications and is capable of learning. It can communicate with other vehicles and its surrounding environment, and, in the form of swarm intelligence, make vehicle fleets safer and more efficient. Currently, ZF, e.Go Mobile AG and Nvidia are collaborating on development and testing of autonomous driving functions for the e.GO Mover.

“New vehicle concepts such as electrically powered people and cargo movers must be developed to be highly iterative and, at the same time, be inexpensively produced,” explains Prof. Dr. Günther Schuh, founder and CEO of e.Go Mobile AG.

His company installed a largely connected Industry 4.0 infrastructure on the campus of RWTH Aachen University for the purpose of building homologation-capable vehicles and developing them for volume production. He said that the joint venture with a strong partner like ZF will allow his company to quickly facilitate new mobility test fleets suitable for vehicle registration as they would be able to combine their  start-up dynamism with ZF’s industrialization expertise and market access. The engineers, production and sales experts at the new company’s proposed base in Aachen have already started working on organizing a rapid market launch.

ZF sees a great deal of future potential worldwide for electric and autonomous vehicles to be used to transport both people and cargo. The ZF Future Study, published in November 2016, has already predicted enormous growth, mainly in the city center logistics industry by 2030.

ZF is constantly on the lookout for external partners and experts in the field of smart mobility with whom it can establish cooperative agreements. This is why the company set up Zukunft Ventures GmbH in September 2016. Zukunft Ventures GmbH is based in Friedrichshafen, and was established with a clear mandate to invest in companies that are actively developing technologies that are relevant for ZF. While these companies would help ZF to expand its portfolio and include sustainable technologies to stay ahead of the competition, the smaller companies benefit from the support they receive from a a strong partner.