On the trail of the future

San Francisco is certainly a good place for this project. The actual Silicon Valley is located about 50 kilometers further south and consists of a string of cities such as Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Cupertino and San Jose. Apple, Facebook, Google parent company Alphabet and thousands of start-ups have their headquarters here. But San Francisco, home to Twitter, LinkedIn and Airbnb, has been a favorite of local tech-scene experts for years. These are exactly the people with whom Neukart and his team are looking for an exchange with. This is why Volkswagen opened an office for Advanced Technologies here, as early ago as 2016.

“We are still in the process of unpacking everything here,” explains Neukart as he tours the office floor in the heart of the city. The rooms exude the charm of a typical start-up: Employees sit together in one of the small meeting rooms in front of a thoroughly scribbled whiteboard, and sofas encompass monitor workstations in the middle of the open office space. On one desk is a colorful unicorn, on another a self-constructed toy gun. Any tech nerd would probably have a heart attack.In the end, however, the daughter freely admits that her father recommended the right model: ‘The Golf is flexible,’ says Ulrike, describing her 2011 Golf VI 1.4 Trendline with 80 horsepower. As such, she has precisely the car her family needs – a reliable and versatile everyday companion for five people. In addition to Ulrike, her husband Tobias and their three children Hana (twelve), Toni (three) and Michel (six months) also appreciate the Golf’s qualities.

Strategic benefits for the Group

As unconventional as the atmosphere here may appear, the strategic objective of the work of Florian Neukart and his team is just as tangible. Technologies that may still sound like science fiction today can, if used correctly, give an automotive group like Volkswagen a decisive edge tomorrow. This truer in a world in which cars are increasingly becoming fully networked devices and mobility is becoming a digital service.

Quantum computers are a good example. For a long time, the potential of these computers, which function completely differently from binary computers, was only discussed in theory.

When Google announced in the autumn that a quantum computer had succeeded in solving a mathematical problem within a few minutes that would take conventional computers thousands of years to solve, computer scientists all over the world paid attention. “This has caused a lot of excitement and also enthusiasm in the community,” explains Andrea Skolik, a colleague of Neukart. There have been very close contacts with Google on the subject of quantum computing since 2017.

What concrete use can quantum computers actually have? Florian Neukart and his team have been researching this for years. They were able to demonstrate it in Lisbon in November in a pilot project that is unique in the world: During the WebSummit tech conference, Volkswagen equipped MAN buses belonging to the Lisbon municipal transport company CARRIS, with an in-house developed traffic control system.

This system uses a quantum computer from D-Wave, another of Volkswagen’s technology partners, and calculates the individually fastest route for each of the nine participating buses and the optimum distribution of the fleet in almost real time. The buses were thus able to detect and avoid traffic jams at an early stage. In this way, it was possible to reduce the travel time of passengers – even during peak periods – and improve the flow of traffic in the city, a project that can be transferred to any municipality and to any size of vehicle fleet. 

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/11/where-is-the-electron-and-how-many-of-them.html

Volkswagen sees itself as being within direct reach of commercial capability here. “The pilot project for bus routing in Lisbon is the first application in the world to use a quantum algorithm productively – end-to-end, starting with the analysis and forecast of traffic behavior, determining routes on the quantum computer, and finally communicating these routes back to the bus drivers via app,” says Florian Neukart.

In concrete terms, this may mean for example, the artificial intelligence is shown pictures of cats or cars until the system automatically recognizes the difference. What at first sounds banal opens up far-reaching possibilities. “There are numerous applications for this,” says Von Dollen at his computer. “In an autonomously driving car, for example, the system can use the images from a video camera to deduce whether there is a pedestrian or something else to be seen.”Such powerful AIs, such as those being developed at Volkswagen’s Data:Lab in Munich, are the key to safe, autonomous cars – the road to future mobility is led by cat images.

Virtual Reality in design

The technology on which Frantisek Zapletal is working is already in concrete use at Volkswagen. The Czech native, who studied in Germany and moved to California with his family, works for the Volkswagen Virtual Engineering Lab and develops virtual reality applications for vehicle design. These are used, for example, in Belmont, some 40 kilometers away, where the Volkswagen development team of around 300 people works for all Group brands.