New Valeo/Qualcomm Partnership

Valeo and Qualcomm announced further details of their technology partnership at Munich IAA in September, inevitably based on the new Ride Pilot software stack.

At the Munich IAA auto show held early September, Qualcomm finally announced full details of its “Ride Pilot” automated driving (AD) stack, developed in partnership with BMW. Ride Pilot is the culmination of years of work between the two companies, and is the production ready perception stack and drive policy software that resulted from the 2021 acquisition of the collaborative driving software from Veoneer.

As always in automotive, news headlines are made and nothing happens for years. Then Qualcomm and BMW stole the show at IAA with Ride Pilot. The resulting software feature set, shown below, is extensive:

Source: Qualcomm

Having witnessed nothing tangible from Qualcomm on the AD software stack since 2021, Ride Pilot is Qualcomm’s inevitable entry into the automotive drive software market. Under the terms of the agreement, the stack has become the property of Qualcomm, which can now license this software to other automakers directly (on a “software tier 1” basis) or via traditional tier 1 suppliers such as Valeo.

Valeo and Qualcomm announced details of their extended technology partnership on the opening day of IAA:

Analysis of the announcement suggests Valeo is building its own platform for both ADAS and AD applications based on the Qualcomm software stack. The key software components of the Valeo offering look to be:

• Ride Pilot software stack.

• Valeo parking stack.

• Seeing Machines DMS/OMS stack.

Let’s dig in further.