Autonomous drive is on Valeo’s radar

At the 2017 Frankfurt, IAA just-auto’s Calum MacRae met with Guillaume Devauchelle, vice president of innovation and scientific development at Valeo. During the show, Valeo unveiled that its future strategic direction would be determined by a focus on three industry megatrends: electric drive; autonomous drive and mobility.

In all three aspects, Valeo is a company playing to its strengths, but this seems to be particularly the case with autonomous driving where Valeo can deliver nearly all of the required systems. As Devauchelle observes, “I will not say 100%, but we can deliver nearly all of the required systems. With SCALA Lidar we are first in the market with Audi. Additionally, we do cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors. Already we deliver 700,000 ultrasonic sensors a day so it’s a huge business for us.”

Valeo also has high hopes for its sensor fusion units, the box of tricks that aggregates all the inputs from the various sensors, “They manage the triple redundancy we believe you need for autonomous driving. On board, we’ll know exactly what is happening even in bright sunlight or if it’s foggy and the camera doesn’t see that much. So we can always guarantee that the image we give to the OEM will be accurate. And we can also provide the PCU that decides what the car should be doing depending on the inputs.”