China’s Geely, the parent company of Volvo, teams up with Tencent to develop smart car technology

With the success of Tesla, the electric vehicle market is becoming more crowded. Tesla has proven the naysayers wrong and achieved what the legacy automakers thought was originally thought was impossible.

Last year, we told you about Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (Geely Holding), the parent company of Volvo after the automaker announced it was teaming up with Mercedes-Benz to build “premium and intelligent electrified” vehicles under the smart brand.

Now, Geekly has reached another agreement to develop smart electric vehicles, this time with Tencent Holdings Ltd. This morning, Geely Holding Group said it has signed an agreement with Tencent Holdings Ltd to develop a smart vehicle cockpit and autonomous driving, according to a report from Reuters.

Geely is now the latest in a list of tech giants including Baidu, Amazon, and Alphabet all working on autonomous driving in the race to develop smart cars. As part of the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop smart car cockpits to have more mobile and mobility service applications, and explore testing of autonomous driving, Geely said in a statement.

The deal with Tencent, which has investments in EV makers including Tesla and Nio, is developing smart car technologies, is the third recent partnership by Hangzhou-based Geely with companies involved in the tech sector.

Geely said this month it would launch a smart electric vehicle (EV) company with Baidu Inc and later that it would form a separate venture with Foxconn to provide contract manufacturing for automakers.