Delphi boosts self-driving efforts with $400 mn deal for nuTonomy

AUTOMOTIVE equipment maker Delphi said Tuesday it was acquiring US university spinoff nuTonomy in a move to bolster its technology for self-driving vehicles.
Delphi, a former General Motors unit now headquartered in Britain, said the deal was valued at US$400 million (RM1.7 billion), with another US$50 million possible in incentive payments.
The deal is likely to expand the reach of nuTonomy, a company spun off by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and which launched the world's first self-driving taxi test project last year in Singapore.
nuTonomy has also announced plans for autonomous taxis with Lyft in Boston, and has a partnership with Peugeot to test its technology with the French automaker's vehicles.
Delphi will combine the nuTonomy team with the group from Ottomatika, a software group for autonomous driving (AD) created at Carnegie Mellon University and acquired in 2015.
"The combination of the nuTonomy and Ottomatika AD teams, along with Delphi's industry-leading portfolio of perception systems and smart vehicle architecture solutions, further enhances our competitive position as the industry's most formidable provider of autonomous mobility solutions," said Delphi's president and chief executive Kevin Clark.
With completion of the deal, Delphi will have autonomous driving operations in Boston, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Singapore and in Santa Monica and Silicon Valley in California.
Delphi is competing in a fast-moving race for autonomous driving with former Google car unit Waymo, Uber and others. — AFP