, Columnist
Google Buys 20,000 SUVs, Apple Gets Two Dozen VW Vans
The tech giant has changed down a few gears on its autos ambitions.
Battle of the robot cars.
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A few years ago, I chatted to a senior Volkswagen AG manager who’d been involved in discussions with Apple Inc. about teaming up on autonomous vehicles.
In essence, he said, Apple had asked the German autos giant to give it a stack of vehicle and driver behavior data. In return, VW would receive the self-driving system — he called it “a black box” — it could fit to its vehicles. He laughed. “No, thanks,” was the response. Former VW CEO Matthias Mueller admitted as much in a 2016 interview, hinting that the two companies had very different views on the much greater value of the carmaker’s data.