What? Of course it is. Companies develop certain models together and then they sell it under their own brands all the time. Peugeot Partner/Citroen Berlingo and pretty much every van out there is a shared development.

That's true, but in that case Peugeot and Citroën have been the same company since more than 40 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_PSA

What about the Toyota/BWM collaboration on the new Supra?

And the Toyota/Subaru collaboration on the BRZ/FR-S/GT86.

Yes - a market that went full mercantalist companies would not be sane or functional. The only time it becomes illegal is price fixing or similiar.

This is just standardization. If one has something sufficiently better than the standard there is an incentive to defect and use it.

It would only be "illegal" if their collaboration resulted in a monopoly. It clearly doesn't. Two businesses collaborating to fend off threatening competitors is perfectly fine. In fact, it's a good thing insofar as it raises their ability to compete, preserving the competitiveness of the market.

> It would only be "illegal" if their collaboration resulted in a monopoly.

No, that's not the standard for a combination in restraint of trade. Controls on monopolies and abuses thereof are not the whole of anti-trust law.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying this is illegal, just that the fact that it doesn't create a monopoly is not, alone, the reason why it isn't illegal.

Yes, my comment oversimplified it, but that's a minimum requirement that isn't being met.

I think it should be the normal thing when is about safety, it would be anti-humanity to say have an invention that makes better breaks and not sharing them with the other manufacturers or for "self driving" to have 20 different implementations, using 20 different training data sets on 20 different OS+frameworks+hardware combinations, if you can get this reduced to a few it should improve safety.

Also keep in mind that this companies do not compete on most of the parts of a car, many of this parts are designed,created and sold by third parties, this third parties can make products for different companies. I assume that now there is not a sufficiently large number of companies building this electric cars parts or self driving hardware and software from which the car producers can buy this parts.

> ... sharing them with the other manufacturers ...

Sharing with all is completely fine. Sharing with selected one (or few) looks shady to me.

I do not see the downsides here, what are you afraid of?

Think about it like this, Ford and BMW are collaborating to make better airbags , in future both companies customers will have more safety because of this so no BMW customers should be upset that the Ford ones also got better airbags. What about the other companies though? Some are making good enough airbags in their opinion, some are buying airbags from a third party that are also good enough.

I am wondering if there is a bit of Silicon Valley jelosy that this companies won't buy SV tech that includes the latest ML buzzwords, the thing is that cars had driver assist features before SV made the autopilot cool again.

"Is that even legal?"

What law would it break? Why wouldn't that imaginary law also apply to, say, mobile phone manufacturers who have entered into agreements to use each other's patents without specific permission or payments?

VW seems to specialise in having a number of brands that sell similar vehicles that differ in fairly minor ways.

most car companies do.

Toyota figured out the Hybrid tech and then licensed it to everyone else, if I remember correctly.

Lol