The Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (VWERL) is a division of the Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., with its headquarters in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

( Belmont, California). The VWERL's slogan ''Technology to the People!'' indicates its mission: to leverage

resources for the advancement of the

Volkswagen Group Volkswagen AG (), known internationally as the Volkswagen Group, is a German public multinational conglomerate manufacturer of passenger and commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines and turbomachinery. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxon ...

s' products through technical knowledge and

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

expertise. The VWERL has recently received media attention surrounding its joint victory with

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in the

DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American vehicle automation, autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Uni ...

, a prize competition for driverless cars.

History

The Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory was founded in August 1998, and VWERL began operations in October 1998, with three employees. As of December 2002, the lab had outgrown its

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real (California), El Camino Real and U.S. Route 101 in California, Highway 1 ...

office and moved to

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

. In 2011 it moved again to Belmont. This current location provides a spacious office, workshop and prototyping areas for about 60 workers. It supports VWERL employees at Volkswagen Group of America's offices in

Auburn Hills, Michigan Auburn Hills is a city in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan. A northern suburb of Detroit, Auburn Hills is located about north of downtown Detroit. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 24,360. Auburn Hills is home to ...

, and the new headquarters at

Herndon, Virginia Herndon is a town in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. Located in Northern Virginia, it is part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In 2020, the population at the census was 24,655, which makes i ...

Affiliation

The VWERL supports all brands within the

.ERL Affiliation
/ref> This includes Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Škoda,

Bentley Bentley Motors Limited is a British designer, manufacturer and marketer of Luxury vehicle, luxury cars and Sport utility vehicle, SUVs. Headquartered in Crewe, England, the company was founded by W. O. Bentley (1888–1971) in 1919 in Crickle ...

, and

Bugatti Automobiles Ettore Bugatti was a German then French automotive industry, manufacturer of high performance vehicle, high-performance automobiles. The company was founded in 1909 in the then-German Empire, German city of Molsheim, Alsace, by the ...

as well as

Audi Audi AG () is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. A subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, Audi produces vehicles in nine production facilities worldwide. The origins of the compa ...

SEAT A seat is a place to sit. The term may encompass additional features, such as back, armrest, head restraint but may also refer to concentrations of power in a wider sense (i.e " seat (legal entity)"). See disambiguation. Types of seat The ...

, and

Lamborghini Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. ( , ), usually referred to as Lamborghini or colloquially Lambo, is an Italian manufacturer of luxury sports cars and SUVs based in Sant'Agata Bolognese. The company is owned by the Volkswagen Group through its su ...

. In addition to working with

research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in some countries as OKB, experiment and design, is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products. R&D constitutes the first stage ...

teams in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, the VWERL also supports the development of

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

-specific features for the Volkswagen Group of America.

Research "teams" at VWERL

The VWERL comprises four teams: *Driver Information and Assistance (DIA) -

Instrumentation Instrumentation is a collective term for measuring instruments, used for indicating, measuring, and recording physical quantities. It is also a field of study about the art and science about making measurement instruments, involving the related ...

, visualization systems *

Human Machine Interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

(HMI) - Interface concepts for driver assistance, infotainment systems *Connected Vehicle (CV) -

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information (''telecommunication'') between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided transm ...

infotainment Infotainment (a portmanteau of ''information'' and ''entertainment''), also called soft news as a way to distinguish it from serious journalism or hard news, is a type of media, usually television or online, that provides a combination of inform ...

, collaborative intelligence,

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

*Test Concepts and Validations (TCV) - Testing procedures, specifications compliance

Headquarters

The VWERL's headquarters are located at 500 Clipper Drive, Belmont CA.

References

External links