Reuters. Hamburg ⋅ The Volkswagen commercial vehicle division (VWN) wants to make money with mobility services and robot taxis by the end of the decade. Calculated across all services, the business area around autonomous driving and the associated services should then generate a return on sales of over ten percent, said division head Carsten Intra on Monday at the presentation of the balance sheet. “We actually plan to break even before 2030,” added Chief Financial Officer Michael Obrowski. In the USA, VWN has set itself a market share of “less than ten percent” for mobility services and over 20 percent in Europe.
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In the Hanover-based van division, the Wolfsburg-based company has bundled the development of autonomous driving both for passenger transport (mobility as a service/“MaaS”) and for transport services (transport as a service/“TaaS”). In the USA, VWN wants to sell the technology developed in the Argo AI joint venture with Ford to driving services such as Uber and Lyft. Lyft has a stake in Argo. Management is willing to talk to those vendors to provide the technical platforms, Intra said. For the development of your own offers, look at the robotaxi company Cruise, which belongs to General Motors, and is testing autonomous driving with a safety driver on board. Intra said VW will develop offers for individual cities. Before such services were launched, the vehicles should cover sufficient test kilometers. “We think we’re within walking distance of Cruise,” Intra said. “We just don’t know exactly whether it’s in front of us or behind us.” Because of the technology used in its vehicles, which uses laser radar to recognize the environment, VWN assumes a high level of safety. VW also wants to launch its own services in Europe. In the area of autonomous driving, MaaS and TaaS, the division wants to offer a profitable offer in 2030 in more than 50 cities in the USA and Europe.