Bosch is buying UK company Five to strengthen its own work in the field of software and autonomous vehicles (AVs).
Based in Cambridge, Five works primarily on a cloud-based development and testing platform for the software used in self-driving cars, and will become part of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division.
“Scale matters in building automated driving technology," says Stan Boland, CEO of Five.
"Bosch is a global leader in driving assistance technologies, with core technologies and vast data lakes that will be essential in bringing safe self-driving systems to market. We’re excited for Five to become part of Europe’s most powerful SAE Level 4 player and to be a part of Bosch’s future success."
No financial details of the transaction have been disclosed and the deal remains subject to antitrust approval.
Five's testing platform gives engineers the programs they need to create automated driving software at pace, and to test it before and during its deployment in test vehicles.
"The platform is able to analyse real data from a fleet of test vehicles, create advanced testing scenarios, and build a simulation environment that makes it possible to assess and validate system behaviour at hyper-scale," the companies say in a statement.
“Five is the perfect fit for our engineering activities – not least due to its associates’ mindset and agile approach. This brings us closer to our aim of getting safe automated driving onto our roads,” says Dr. Mathias Pillin, president of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division.
Bosch recently bought Atlatec, which provides high-resolution digital maps.
The company says this means it is the only one to offer its customers all the necessary building blocks of automated driving from a single source – from actuators, sensors, and maps to software and the engineering environment.
“Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer," says Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the Bosch board of management and chairman of the Mobility Solutions business sector.
"We want Five to give an extra boost to our work in software development for safe automated driving, and offer our customers European-made technology.”
