Quality has always been part of Audi's DNA, and it's also the aim of a pilot project launched last year at the Neckarsulm site to check the correct execution of spot welds in high-volume production. The partners in this project, which is part of the Volkswagen Group's Industrial Cloud which is to be implemented in other plants, are Siemens and Amazon Web Services. In the body of a car like the Audi A6, around 5,300 spot welds are required. Up until now, the quality of the welds has been monitored manually by technicians using ultrasound on the basis of random analyses. In the WPS Analytics pilot project, in which specialists from the fields of manufacturing, innovation management, planning, digitization and IT are involved, artificial intelligence is used to detect quality anomalies automatically and in real time.

A pilot project being conducted at Audi's Neckarsulm site is using artificial intelligence to control the quality of spot welds in high-volume production. The solution is being advanced together with Siemens and Amazon Web Services as part of the Volkswagen Group's Industrial Cloud, and is set to be rolled out at other locations. Around 5,300 spot welds are required to join the parts that make up the body of an Audi A6. Up until now, production staff use ultrasound to manually monitor the quality of resistance spot welding (abbreviated WPS in German) processes on the basis of random analyses. However, experts from the fields of manufacturing, innovation management, digitalization planning, and IT are currently testing a much smarter way of determining the quality of spot welds at the Neckarsulm site.

The self-driving car race seems like it's been going on forever, but also at times seems like it has no ending -- since it's so hard to get truly self-driving cars (from point to point) on the market. A lot of hope is being put on Tesla because it is collecting enormous amount of data (oodles more than anyone else) and feeding it into neural nets managed by potentially the best autonomous driving professionals on the planet. But there is no guarantee they are going along the best route, and there are many other players in the field. Perhaps the two most notable players in this field other than Tesla, from my perspective, are Zoox (because it was just bought by Amazon, which has potential to develop its tech at an enormous scale) and Argo.AI (company site here). It mostly (but not entirely) comes down to its potential to quickly collect data at a massive scale.

I'm sure you've all read articles about how very soon robots will be coming to take our jobs: self-driving cars taking our driving jobs, self-assembling machines taking our manufacturing jobs, self-eating food taking our restaurant jobs, self-internet surfing AIs taking our office jobs, and so on. I've always thought that I, a noted idiot who babbles about car stuff all day, would be relatively safe from this robotic replacement campaign. There's a new article-writing AI that might prove me wrong, though. The AI system is known as Grover, like Muppets and Presidents, and was developed as a system to detect artificially-generated news stories, when the developers realized the best way to make a fake-news detector was to make a fake-news generator. From what I can tell, the AI does attempt to replicate the style of the website you'd like it to generate a story for, and it appears to even take into account the author.

Volkswagen Group announced the creation of a subsidiary called Volkswagen Autonomy (VWAT) on Monday, with the German car giant saying it planned to "make autonomous driving market-ready." With offices in Munich and Wolfsburg, Volkswagen said that VWAT would aim to "bring a self-driving system… to market maturity." As well as its sites in Germany, Volkswagen said it also planned to establish companies in Silicon Valley and China in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Alexander Hitzinger, the Volkswagen Group's senior vice president for autonomous driving, will manage the new company. "We want to establish Volkswagen Autonomy as a global technology company where we bundle expertise from the automotive and technology industries, combining the agility and creativity of a high-performance culture with process orientation and scalability," Hitzinger said in a statement.

Engineers at VW Group are working on the predictive capabilities stemming from analysis of large data volumes. At the Volkswagen Group IT Data Lab, a team is using human reasoning to analyse big data with the support of artificial intelligence. Their predictive analysis helps make many procedures and corporate processes even more efficient and sustainable, it is claimed. At the Data Lab, Volkswagen's competence center for artificial intelligence (AI) in Munich, a team of several experts is working on the data. "Our work is like a jigsaw puzzle," says Gabriele Compostella, an IT specialist.

Motor Trend will never publish a First Drive review on the Volkswagen SEDRIC. That's because the SEDRIC, which Volkswagen Group is currently evaluating for launch sometime after 2023, is a completely autonomous vehicle. It has no steering wheel. You just call it up on your smartphone and tell it where you are and where you want to go. When it arrives, get in, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Both Hyundai and the Volkswagen Group announced today that they are partnering with self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation and will be incorporating the firm's autonomous driving systems into their own vehicles. Hyundai will be working the technology into its latest fuel cell vehicle, debuting next week at CES, while the Volkswagen Group says it could be incorporated into a number of its brands' vehicles, including self-driving Sedric pods, shuttles, delivery vans or trucks. Aurora was launched last year by three big shots in the self-driving world -- Chris Urmson, who headed Google's self-driving project before it was spun out as Waymo, Tesla's Sterling Anderson and Uber's Drew Bagnell. The company is focused on developing highly and fully autonomous driving systems that they can then license to companies like Hyundai and Volkswagen. While this sort of strategy means those companies won't have exclusive technology like they would if they developed it themselves, it allows them to get their hands on it more quickly and while devoting fewer resources to technology that is currently in constant flux.

Volkswagen is working with Nvidia to expand its usage of its artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies beyond autonomous vehicles and into other areas of business, the two companies revealed today. VW set up its Munich-based data lab in 2014. Last year it pushed on with the hiring of Prof. Patrick van der Smagt to lead a dedicated AI team that is tasked with taking the technology into areas such as'robotic enterprise,' or use of the technology in enterprise settings. VW wants to use AI and deep learning to power new opportunities within its corporate business functions and, more widely, "in the field of mobility services." As an example, the German car-maker said it is working on procedures to help optimize traffic flow in cities and urban areas, while it sees the potential for intelligent human-robot collaboration, too.

In the consumer report, we are number one once again and just like the Q7, in the consumer report it also occupies the first position as the best luxury SUV. And I think this power of the brand makes it possible for us to grow significantly. There are couple of models which have not even be launched yet in this market, models which we already know here, for instance the S4, the A5, and the entirely new A5 Sportback. They are now being launched in the United States. All new models for this market, and I assume that this year once again we are going to experience very solid growth in the United States. And the question so whether we spend more money for this? I can tell you we even spend less money in form of sales discounts because of the powerful brand and the relatively young product portfolio. So you would take the second part?