Brave new car: Bosch eyes Google, spends €4 billion on self-driving vehicles

Stuttgart-based Bosch, the world's largest car-component maker, is putting the pedal to the metal, announcing a five-year investment program worth €4 billion ($4.6 billion) to boost the development of self-driving cars and quadruple the number of artificial intelligence experts to 4,000 by 2021. "Driverless driving will be a game changer for individual mobility. It will open the door to disruptive business models such as robotaxis and shuttle-based mobility," Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner said in a statement. "We want to belong to, and can be, among the top," he said, hinting at US and Chinese rivals. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google owner Alphabet, is considered a leader in self-driving car technology and has already tested driverless vehicles on hundreds of thousands of miles. Tesla, with its Autopilot feature, taxi service Uber and the Chinese rival Didi are also far advanced in testing autonomous vehicles.