Fiat-Chrysler’s boss Sergio Marchionne said that the agreement between Google and his company is the first phase of their partnership, during the production launch of the 2017 Pacifica minivan.
“This first phase of the operation is very targeted. It’s designed to take Google technology into the minivan. It’s very, very focused,” Marchionne said to reporters. “There’s a very clear objective and a very clear timeline. What develops from here? We’ll see.”
AutoNews reports that FCA’s strategy is to keep an open mind when it comes to partnership, with Marchionne saying that they will not necessarily latch on a specific company or technology: “I’ve seen efforts by others to pre-empt what I consider to be a natural evolution of choices, so making unequivocal bets with companies who are in that space today and effectively precluding the development with others is a very dangerous path, at least in our view.”
Last week FCA and Google officially announced their partnership into building a fleet of autonomous vehicles, using the new Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid as the basis. The plan is to initially build 100 minivans which will have Google’s self-driving technology installed to be used in their testing program.
Other manufacturers have walked away from talks with Google, with reports suggesting that they disagreed over the ownership of the data generated by the tests. Marchionne said that these concerns exist, without providing more info on the matter.
“There are a lot of unresolved issues,” he said. “… The most important one is: What is the economic model that ultimately determines the sharing of the attributes of this new model? Who gets what out of all this? Now, I don’t have an answer. But if we don’t start exploring this, we’ll never know.”