ZF Friedrichshafen is going ahead with plans to for a joint venture with e.GO Mobile AG through its subsidiary Zukunft Ventures. The aim is to develop, produce and sell autonomous people 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."

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," explains 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.

He further adds, "Cooperating with a strong partner like ZF enables us to quickly offer cities and the drivers of new mobility test fleets suitable for vehicle registration because we combine our start-up dynamism with ZF's industrialisation expertise and market access."