Dhe auto supplier ZF from Friedrichshafen is getting serious about its autonomous vehicles for local public transport. In the USA, several thousand shuttles are to be delivered “well before 2030”, said ZF manager Torsten Gollewski of the FAZ. The same order of magnitude is planned for Europe, but he did not want to give a total number. With sales of almost 40 billion euros in 2021 and 160,000 employees, ZF is the third largest automotive supplier in the world.
In addition, the manager who heads the autonomous mobility solutions department announced that the group would be repositioned in the area of autonomous driving. “We are bundling various units in a powerful organization,” said Gollewski, who claims to be taking over the management of the new unit. These include the Dutch subsidiary 2Getthere, which ZF acquired in 2019. Gollewski did not say how big the unit would be.
He rejected reports from the summer that ZF wanted to part with activities in the field of autonomous driving and described this as a false report. But he would be happy about new partners, Gollewski told the FAZ: “We are open to investors, but will remain in the majority.”
ZF does not want to produce Shuttle itself
ZF has repeatedly advertised its autonomous shuttles prominently in recent years. In 2018, the group, at that time still together with an Aachen partner, announced annual production in the five-digit range. In addition, there was talk of demand for one million vehicles within five to seven years. According to Gollewski, there are not yet 100 shuttles on the road. In Rotterdam, the French Transdev group uses the vehicles in separate lanes.
The manager now called the plans in the USA “concrete”; but they depended on the partner. The traditional group cooperates with the US start-up Beep, which operates public transport in cities with autonomous vehicles and also works with the Austrian-German car supplier Benteler. According to Gollewski, ZF does not want to produce the shuttles itself, but rather obtain them from a partner. Due to the specifications of the Biden government, you need a different partner in the USA than in Europe.
According to the company, the latest ZF shuttles are fully autonomous (level 4) and can be used not only in separate lanes, but also in mixed traffic. They have 15 seats and can accommodate a total of 22 people. The purely electric range is 130 kilometers, the vehicles should initially drive a maximum of 40, later possibly also 80 kilometers per hour.
