CTO Blog: Boston - The Technology Revolution

By: Glen De Vos, Aptiv's chief technology officer

Boston was the birthplace of a revolution. If you need to brush up on your history, the American Revolutionary War was launched in Boston on December 16, 1773, when the Sons of Liberty destroyed an entire shipment of British Tea by dumping it into Boston Harbor.

It’s that spirit of independence that attracts so many people to live and work in Boston – and it is clearly evident in the technology revolution taking place there today. Only this revolution is not about taxation without representation, it’s about autonomous driving technology and the new world of mobility.

So, it’s only fitting that we announced today Aptiv is expanding our U.S. footprint by opening an autonomous vehicle development technical center in Boston. Given its roots in upstart technologies, the abundance of local technical talent, government support and access to top universities and incubators, Boston is the right choice for our Mobility team and tech center.

Our new tech center will be located in the South Boston Seaport area, and the team we establish there will focus on automated driving, artificial intelligence and deep learning to advance the company’s future mobility capabilities. It will also be home to nuTonomy, the newest addition to our team.

Rapidly becoming a nexus for mobility development, Boston provides a robust testing environment with challenging urban surroundings and diverse weather conditions, making it ideal for advancing the development of automated vehicle driving.

And we’ve teamed with AT&T to develop an end-to-end smart city solution in Boston, in support of Go Boston 2030, a smart city development program, which envisions a more efficient and connected transportation network that includes autonomous vehicles.

Automated driving technology could help the city increase accessibility to public transit and alleviate congestion. Potential test cases for Aptiv include linking neighborhoods not directly connected to public transit, and point-to-point transportation.

Aptiv has a long-standing relationship with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We were the one of the first to invest as a founding member in the MIT AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium, which focuses on the relationship/behavior between consumers and automated cars. It’s these types of partnerships that help us to look at every angle of the future of transportation. We are excited to contribute to the collective advancement of autonomous driving efforts.

We will need to hire a lot of talented engineers and I can’t wait to get started.