
The largest auto parts supplier in the world, Bosch, will see its annual sales of semi-autonomous “driver assistance” tech total €2 billion as soon as 2019, company execs have predicted.
Such an achievement would require that Bosch outpaces the already quite high market growth rate of 25% a year in that sector. Considering how rapidly such systems are being deployed, in many cases becoming standard to many models, long-established Bosch likely can outstrip the sector’s 25% market growth rate, even if that might sound unrealistic at first. Bosch has been a supplier for Tesla, Mercedes, and many other automakers.
To explain, the sorts of technologies and systems being referred to with the phrase “driver assistance” are ones such as: emergency automatic braking, blind spot alerts, lane keeping, etc. Eventually, these technologies will merge with the likely-to-be-very-lucrative autonomous driving tech sector. Bosch is of course interested in exactly that merger, and the substantial financial opportunities that accompany it.
Reuters provides more: “Bosch, which also makes home appliances and industrial products, sees its overall automotive business growing by 7% to €47 billion this year. The German group said it would be helped by the move to electric vehicles — led by China, where it already has a top position. It also supplies the powertrain system for Europe’s biggest electric-vehicle fleet, the German post office’s Streetscooters.
“Chief Executive Volkmar Denner said Bosch was not betting solely on electrification, despite a heated current debate in Germany about driving bans in cities for polluting vehicles and the future of the combustion engine.”
The exact words used were: “For us, it’s not just the one or the other. We want to keep our technological options open, and not restrict ourselves to a single path.”
I suppose that’s about what you’d expect an auto industry exec to say, but it still doesn’t make for good PR considering the profoundly negative effect that diesel cars have had on public health in Europe.
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