Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler and supplier Robert Bosch are teaming up to develop self-driving cars in an alliance primarily aimed at accelerating the production of "robo-taxis".Tech companies and carmakers are preparing for a new way of doing business in the auto industry as customers use smartphones to locate, hail and rent vehicles, rather than going out and buying a car.Teaming up with Bosch helps Mercedes throw more engineering resources at autonomous cars, allowing it to bring forward the date for having a production-ready system for autonomous cars by several years. Mercedes-Benz responded by developing an S-class limousine that drove 103 km (64 miles) between the German towns of Mannheim and Pforzheim a year later.3 billion, a deal which followed Qualcomm&OEM Stainless steel Faucet Manufacturers39;s $47 billion deal to acquire Dutch automotive chip supplier NXP."The prime objective of the project is to achieve the production-ready development of a driving system which will allow cars to drive fully autonomously in the city," Daimler said in a statement on Tuesday. That will be too late," von Hugo said, adding that the prospect of new revenue streams from maintaining fleets of robo-taxis was a big motivating factor for doubling up the carmaker's R&D efforts."Cars which do not rely on any driver input have a different architecture and sensor setup, with more radar and cameras," Christoph von Hugo, a senior Mercedes-Benz safety manager, told Reuters at a recent event to present safety systems.The autonomous system will now be ready by the beginning of next decade, Daimler said, without disclosing when it had first envisaged the commercial launch of robo-taxis.Before deciding to partner with Bosch, Mercedes-Benz had two engineering teams working on autonomous vehicles.

Full autonomy - known as an "eyes off, brains off" or "level 5" system - does away with even the need for a steering wheel." . One took an evolutionary approach, upgrading the capabilities of conventional vehicles, while the other team took a more radical approach to the car's design. Mercedes-Benz and auto supplier ZF also have separate alliances with Nvidia."Within a specified area of town, customers will be able to order an automated shared car via their smartphone."EYES OFF, BRAIN OFFThe cutthroat competition to launch self-driven cars has forced carmakers to change pace."If you take the robo-taxi, you start perhaps in a city or several cities or areas of cities, and then you grow from there," he said.Autonomous vehicles came closer to road-going reality after Google unveiled a prototype car which it developed with the help of Bosch back in 2012.Real commercial applications for autonomous cars will start to take off between 2020 and 2025, Ola Kaellenius, Daimler board member and head of Group Research and Mercedes-Benz Cars development told Reuters last month.Bosch is already one of the world's largest suppliers of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and recently announced an alliance with US tech firm Nvidia to develop a self-driving computer for production cars. "The idea behind it is that the vehicle should come to the driver rather than the other way round.Mercedes-Benz's arch rival BMW teamed up with Israeli autonomous vehicle tech company Mobileye and chip maker Intel last year to develop new technology that could put autonomous cars on the road by 2021. 

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