Volvo Gets Interesting

Too many articles to keep track of that say the same thing about the basics of the deal between Volvo and Autoliv. Both are located in Sweden, though Volvo is owned by the Chinese. The photo of the Volvo and Autoliv chief executives looks like the beginning of a Ingmar Bergman movie about upper class angst in Scandanavia, with beautiful white kitchens in which there is no screaming or Italian food.

I'm just going to list a few articles; there are so many more. The reports all pretty much cover the same material facts.
Wall Street Journal article
Endgadget.com post - also information about the Volvo/Uber deal
The Detroit Bureau (an automotive industry publication) - has the aforementioned photo

Question

Lingering in my mind is the question of whether Volvo is already behind the curve on a path that Nvidia, Drive.ai, and Comma.ai are well in the midst of paving? Perhaps Volvo believes it is technologically ahead; perhaps the company believes and indeed can bank on its credibility and its acumen to surge ahead; perhaps there is something of the Jackson Pollock style of painting here - throw something and see if it sticks. (Apologies to Pollock and modern art enthusiasts, but I'm not a big fan of the artist's work.)

Something new in the Swedish water?

Volvo has been a busy bee of late. In addition to the Uber deal and the Autoliv deal, Volvo is testing other driverless vehicles. It is showing off a driverless vehicle in New Zealand as well as testing a driverless truck in an underground mine. According to wikimapia, "[t]he mine consists of polymetallic ore containing zinc, copper, lead, gold and silver, as well as copper ore and gold ore. Around 80% of the ore mined at Kristineberg is extracted using the cut-and-fill method." Correctly assume that I have no idea what that means or how environmentally responsible such mining practices are.

And there's more with Uber and Volvo partnering on driverless Volvo trucks that are currently tooling around the San Francisco Bay area. These are already on the highway.

One can assume that the B2B market of trucking will be, no pun intended, a gold mine. One can assume that Daimler and Volvo will be big competitors, as past reports have shown.