- The commercial low-orbit satellite to be launched by the end of this year
- Will help the increasing number of autonomous driving cars
Geely Holding Group, the parent company of Volvo and Lotus, announced it will become the country’s first private company to build commercial satellites. According to the Chinese company, the production-and-testing is already underway in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province. Geely plans to begin the launch of commercial low-orbit satellites by the end of this year.
Geely believes that the satellites will give them an edge in the growing autonomous car industry. It will also provide more accurate navigation systems that can pinpoint locations by the centimetre, not meters to the self-driving cars in the coming days. We have already reported Volvo’s plans to boost the development of the autonomous driving technology a few weeks back (you can read about it over here). The Chinese-owned Scandinavian carmaker has invested in Zenuity, an assisted and autonomous driving software development company. With the launch of their satellite, this autonomous project will surely benefit by it to a great extent.
This is not the first ambitious move from Geely in the recent past. The Hangzhou-based company bought Volvo Group in 2010 and Lotus Cars in 2017. They also became the biggest shareholder in Daimler AG. Apart from that, Geely has also invested in VoloCity air taxi to launch it commercially within the next three years. And the company got into an agreement with state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. in 2018 to build supersonic trains. This newest decision of making a satellite mirrors Elon Musk’s Space X mission.
