The Chinese company, DJI is the world’s largest drone maker, but the company is trying to get into other areas of tech business as well. This would not be the first time that a company has ventured outside of its area of expertise into a completely different area. The DJI company, last year, mentioned that the company was building an engineering team to work on self-driving technologies.
Self-driving technology, of late, has gained immense popularity, and the world’s most leading automakers are spending time and energy behind developing such a technology that would be pioneering. On April 12th, the Chinese drone-maker finally announced that the company has launched its smart driving business brand called DJI Automotive. Interestingly, DJI dominates the global small drone business with a 69% market share which estimates the market worth of the company to be somewhere near $8.4 billion last year.
As per the official reports, the new branch of DJI will be dedicated completely to empowering travel with space smart technology by focusing on R&D, production, and sales of smart driving systems while also not losing focus on its core components.
Moreover, it was also reported that DJI was planning to sell the driver-assist technology which includes lidar sensors, and packaged solutions for autonomous driving functions.
DJI’s move does not come as a shock to anyone as various hardware and software tech firms are also racing towards autonomous driving technology. One of the most famous tech companies based in China, Huawei which is primarily a smartphone manufacturing company, had also launched a car business unit and the company is on its way to developing sensors. Baidu, which has been working on autonomous driving and smart car technologies, has partnered with Geely to make its own cars. There are several other companies that are on a similar path.
Notably, VW China has already signed up with DJI for making use of the new driving solutions. The VW China CEO Dr Stephan Wollenstein said in a statement, “As we all know, DJI has advanced technology in the field of visual information processing, so we are also cooperating with it to develop autonomous and semi-autonomous driving technologies based on various road scenes. It is hoped that this technology can be applied to mass-produced models in the near future.” At the same time, Wollenstein also revealed that VW also “hopes that related technologies can be introduced into the group’s products in the European market in the future”.
