The automobile manufacturer AUDI has founded a special company — Audi Electronics Venture GmbH (AEV) whose task is to ensure that electronics and software — a guarantor of innovations in automobile construction — become a core competence of the company. On the one hand AEV will build up its own expertise levels within the company, while ensuring on the other hand that the flow of innovation into the company is permanently safeguarded. Thanks to the independent l form of the company as a GmbH (limited liability corporation), AEV can react both quickly and flexibly — a fundamental precondition for working successfully in a market characterized by rapid developments.
Examples of AEV's activities are in the fields of technology scouting, which is intended to ensure early identification of future technologies, and new business development, where analysis, projection and strategy formulation are at the fore. Further fields of activity are business planning, cooperation management and strategic engineering. A current example is the collaboration with PMDTechnologies GmbH (PMDTec), which has developed a so-called photonic mixer device. This light sensor — also called a seeing diode — makes it possible to see distances directly in addition to the conventional brightness image without the need for high-performance computers to be connected. For example, it can be used for pre-crash detection, pedestrian recognition or assisted parking.