As you can see the current economic situation around the world forces everyone to save and postpone the indefinite future of ambitious technology plans.

It seems that in the current situation, when the coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on the economy of the whole world, everyone must focus on their future and worry about their own business, instead of spending time and resources on maintaining joint plans. At least, this is the assumption of two giants of the automotive market, i.e. BMW and Mercedes, which after less than a year of cooperation announced that they are finishing with a joint project. Both companies also noted that the split was in agreement and was a joint decision, and what is more, they cannot be ruled out again in the future.

So what prompted BMW and Mercedes to make such a decision? 

In a joint statement we can read that the development of a joint autonomous car platform was a more complex and costly task than they expected, therefore everyone will go their own way and will continue their own work in this area, which, however, does not preclude the involvement of new partners. This may suggest that the official argument by the way, and the actual reason for the termination of cooperation could be the inability of the German giants to agree on certain issues or the fact that both companies approached the venture a bit too ambitiously.

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The further part of the statement indicates that the final financial scope of the joint venture could be presented to companies by experts only after signing the contract and as it turned out, we are talking about expenses that they cannot or do not want to afford in the current economic situation. Especially that from the beginning the cooperation aimed very high, because the corporations aimed at an autonomous level 4 car with the option of driving on highways and parking on their own in 2024. Most industry experts immediately emphasized that these are too ambitious plans, and if we consider the fact that drivers are not yet too enthusiastic about self-driving cars, then as a result we have a recipe for failure.

As we mentioned, manufacturers will continue to work independently on autonomous car projects, because as Klaus Fröhlich from BMW assures: "We are systematically developing our technology and a scalable platform with such partners as Intel, Mobileye, FCA or Ansys. Our current generation of technology offers very strong potential: With extremely powerful sensors and computing power, our great modular system puts us in a great position to provide our customers with what they need for many years."

Well, two huge companies are splitting from each other on autonomous car manufacturing. We will see their future projects all together.