Visteon Opens Silicon Valley Tech Center

Visteon Corp. has opened a technical center in Santa Clara, Calif., to lead the company’s development of autonomous vehicle technologies and other advanced engineering systems.

The Silicon Valley office will focus on artificial intelligence software, advanced driver awareness systems and deep machine learning. These efforts will be led by Matthias Schulze, who will join Visteon next month following a 29-year career with Daimler AG, where he most recently was senior manager of environment perception.

Working with other Visteon facilities worldwide, the new tech center will develop control systems, localization and vision processing systems that interpret real-time camera data and convert it to information required for autonomous driving.

Visteon aims to launch its first autonomous driving domain controller platform in 2018. The company says the system will apply machine learning technology to accurately detect and classify objects in a vehicle's path, then plan a vehicle's movements based on this information.

Visteon’s AI team is led by Vijay Nadkarni, who joined Visteon earlier this year. He most recently was CEO of Chalkzen, Inc., a San Francisco-based startup he founded that launched a software-as-a-service and connected car services platform.