Autonomous electro mobility will make traffic in metropolitan areas cleaner, safer and more efficient. To promote the establishment of these systems and to inspire new technological innovations, ZF has established a joint venture with the company e.GO Mobile AG through its subsidiary Zukunft Ventures. The goals of the new joint venture e.GO Moove, headquartered in Aachen, Germany, are to develop, produce and sell autonomous peoplemovers and cargo movers. The first prototype was recently presented on the campus of RWTH Aachen University.
“Autonomous, connected and thus highly flexible e-shuttle vehicles will play a significant role in urban and metropolitan areas of the future as safe, comfortable, efficient and environmentally-friendly modes of transport,” said Dr. Stefan Sommer, CEO of ZF Friedrichshafen AG. “These vehicles bring us one important step closer toward our Vision Zero.”
ZF is a leading automotive supplier of electrified drivelines, which are an important building block in ZF’s vision and commitment to this joint venture company e.GO Moove, because they are characterized by durability, economy and a high level of efficiency. In addition, ZF also will make its advance driver assistance systems chassis and sensor fusion technologies available to this planned joint venture. 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 is based on 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. ZF, e.GO Mobile AG and Nvidia are working together to develop and test 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,” said Prof. Dr. Günther Schuh, founder and CEO of e.GO Mobile AG. His company has installed a largely connected Industry 4.0 infrastructure on the campus of RWTH Aachen University that can be used to efficiently build homologation-capable vehicles and develop them for volume production.
