Here’s a very partial list of acquisitions made over the past 12 months:
- Intel bought Israel’s Mobileye for US $15 billion and made it the center of its autonomous driving program. It also invested $390 million in Here, a mapping company.
- Ford poured US $1 billion into Argo and made it the center of its robocar program.
- Broadcom bid $193 billion for auto supplier Qualcomm, which had itself bid $38 billion for NXP, a major robocar supplier—thanks to its own recent acquisition of Freescale. So far, only the Freescale acquisition has actually gone through.
- Delphi acquired robocar firm NuTonomy for $450 million.
- GM Cruise—created in 2016 when GM acquired Cruise—acquired Stobe, a flash-lidar company, for an undisclosed sum.
- Lidar companies are popping up like mushrooms after a storm, fueled by VC money, hope, and the fear of missing out. Ford’s Argo subsidiary doubled down on Ford’s earlier investment in Velodyne, and it hedged its bet by also investing in Princeton Lightwave. Delphi invested in LedderTech and Innoviz. TetraVue has received VC funding from Bosch and Samsung. Luminar is backed by Peter Thiel, among others.
- Meanwhile, a lot of companies are forming robocar partnerships—Bosch and Nvidia, Audi and Nvidia, Lyft and NuTonomy, and on and on.