Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Delphi rebrands itself as Aptiv, sharpens focus on autonomous driving

Stephen Edelstein
By

Aptiv self-driving car
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Delphi Automotive wants to transform itself from a traditional automotive parts supplier into a tech company focused on autonomous driving. The company is spinning off its powertrain division into a separate entity called Delphi Technologies, and rebranding everything else under a new corporate name — Aptiv.

Delphi started out as a division of General Motors, but was spun off by GM in 1999. The company’s traditional focus has been on components for powertrains and other major automotive systems, all of which will now be the purview of the Delphi Technologies spinoff. As Aptiv, the company will focus on electronics and other technologies related to autonomous driving.

Recommended Videos

The move is based on an assumption that automakers will adopt self-driving cars en masse over the next few years. Given the number of autonomous-driving projects currently underway at companies like Ford and General Motors, one can see why Delphi/Aptiv executives would make that assumption. Aptiv plans to provide autonomous-driving systems that automakers can marry with their cars, essentially updating Delphi’s traditional supplier role for the new technology.

Related

Aptiv wants to cut the cost of these systems to around $5,000 by 2025, CEO Kevin Clark said in an interview with Reuters. That’s an estimated 90 percent lower than systems available today. Clark said the price cut would be achieved by advances in technology, higher volumes, and by automakers redesigning their cars to better accommodate the necessary hardware.

Delphi was already heavily involved in self-driving cars before its reorganization as Aptiv. The company sent its own prototype self-driving car on a cross-country journey between San Francisco and New York in 2015, and joined the BMW-Intel-Mobileye autonomous-driving alliance after that. Earlier this year, it purchased Boston-based autonomous-driving startup NuTonomy.

Given the hype surrounding self-driving cars, it makes sense for a major automotive supplier like Delphi to want to reorient itself toward the new technology. But it isn’t alone. Another major supplier, Continental, is dabbling in autonomous-driving tech, as are a number of tech companies and suppliers of individual components, such as lidar company Velodyne. But self-driving cars need to be perfected — and accepted by the public — in order to generate the business these companies expect.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Stephen Edelstein
Stephen Edelstein
Contributing Editor
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Aptiv’s machine learning-powered radar sees even what you don’t
lyft and aptivs self driving car program has come a long way but not far enough aptiv screen press

Aptiv traveled to CES 2022 to showcase the improvements it has made to its suite of advanced driver assistance systems. It notably leveraged the power of machine learning technology to help its self-driving prototypes detect and classify objects, even those that are out of sight.

Think of a self-driving car as a human being; radars are the eyes and machine learning technology is the brain. Fitting radars to a car's body allows it to scope out the environment it operates in. It can detect that there's a car in front of it, that there's a bike coming the other way, and that there's a traffic light it needs to stop for. These are fairly straightforward tasks that most self-driving prototypes already perform.

Read more
We now know what the self-driving Apple Car might look like
A render that shows what the Apple Car might look like.

Thanks to several 3D concept renders, we now know what the future self-driving Apple Car might look like.

Vanarama, a British car-leasing company, took inspiration from other Apple products, as well as Apple patents, in order to accurately picture the rumored Apple car.

Read more