At the opening of the Frankfurt Motor Show, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer (COO), Sheryl Sandberg, has proclaimed that Facebook is not interested in developing a car and that the company has no plans to compete with regular car manufacturers. Instead, Facebook plans on working alongside these traditional car makers and sponsor what it calls a "new mobility world."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the motor show, where a number of German car makers have gathered along with other tech companies so that they might work together and craft a future of electric and autonomous cars. The joke behind all of this is that many other tech companies, particularly from Silicon Valley, like Apple and Google, have all been toying with the development of their own vehicles, particularly automated ones, undoubtedly shaking up the playing field for the auto industry.
If one also considers the recent decisions from countries like India, and the UK, to stop the production of fossil fuel burning cars in coming decades, as well as the success of Tesla's electric cars, it appears that car makers and tech companies will most certainly have to work together to create products that can compete in what appears to be an all-electric autonomous future of transport.
Source and image: Reuters
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