Samsung makes a $300 million push into self-driving cars

Samsung is making a big push into the nascent self-driving car market with a new

$300 million fund and a dedicated business unit for developing autonomous technology, the company announced today. That new unit will be built inside Harman, the audio technology giant that Samsung acquired for $8 billion late last year. Its goal will be to build a top to bottom technological platform that automakers can incorporate into their cars to run everything from infotainment to self-driving capabilities. The announcement comes two weeks after the California Department of Motor Vehicles revealed Samsung was granted a self-driving vehicle permit in that state, adding to the ones that the company already had in its home country. Of course, dozens of companies big and small have self-driving permits in California. So today’s news offers much more clarity about Samsung’s big ambitions in the autonomous vehicle space, including a goal of building a more open-source suite of self-driving software solutions. “Our industry is literally screaming, saying, ‘We love Mobileye but we need an open platform,’” Dinesh Paliwal, Harman’s chief executive officer, told Bloomberg. “Competition is the best thing ever. The auto industry wants us to do it and we think we have the capacity and the fuel power.”                                                                                https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16307222/samsung-audi-self-driving-cars