[INTERVIEW] Stellantis seeks to increase cooperation with Korean companies for EV transition
來源：開云體育app官方網站發布日期：2023-01-30 10:14:21 瀏覽：15448
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| Stellantis Chief Software Officer Yves Bonnefont poses next to Chrysler's first electric vehicle concept Airflow at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Wednesday (local time). Korea Times photo by Kim Hyun-bin |
By Kim Hyun-bin
LAS VEGAS ― Stellantis has been seeking to enhance cooperation with Korean firms to better fulfill its full electric vehicle (EV) pledge by 2028.
"We have announced an MOU (memorandum of understanding) to establish joint venture battery factories especially here in North America with both LG and Samsung," Stellantis Chief Software Officer (CSO) Yves Bonnefont said during an interview with The Korea Times at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022 held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Wednesday (local time). "We want to cooperate with battery suppliers to create battery manufacturing capabilities."
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| Logo for Consumer Electronics Show / Courtesy of Consumer Technology Association |
The move comes as Stellantis aims to transition into an EV company after having announced last July it would inject more than 30 billion euros by 2025 to develop a flagship EV lineup.
Busy not only in the EV battery sector, Stellantis has been enhancing relations with Samsung Electronics to help ease semiconductor chip shortage issues. The CSO says the semiconductor crisis was "not anticipated" by the automotive industry, but now it is important to deal with the issue going forward. However, he did add that the shortage crisis also became a means to enhance relations with the Korean tech giant.
"The company has been interacting directly with semiconductor companies such as Samsung and TSMC and much more than the past. In the past, they were tier 2 to us, maybe sometimes tier 3. Today we talk to them on a regular basis," he said.
The company has been striving to obtain level 3 autonomous driving, which the CSO says will be reached in 2024.
"We will be releasing level 3 in 2024. At the same time, we are working to make continuous improvements of level 2 with adding more and more features. We see this as a continuum ― in fact we are working to create a platform called the 'Stella Auto Drive' which is a platform capable of doing L2, L2 Plus and L3. It is a scalable platform that we can have on different vehicle sizes and these platforms can be populated with the right hardware and software to deliver a certain level of autonomy between L2 and L3," Bonnefont said.
However, he did point out that the major hurdle in reaching full autonomy is not a technical matter but rather a legality issue.
"The No.1 challenge in full autonomy right now is the legal framework around it. The technology is there; the regulatory framework today is not there for sure," he said.
Although autonomous driving is a popular goal within the global automotive industry, Bonnefont says the software aspect is one of the most efficient ways to differentiate products.
"What we believe is that software is a cost-effective and fast way to differentiate brands; you can develop very nice differentiating features," he said. "We will have a complete portfolio of software and solutions for vehicles and required hardware to be applied to the different vehicle models."
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