Mercedes Benz

Jan Carlson: "We saw an opportunity to increase our focus on the area of active safety toward autonomous driving." As CEO of Autoliv, Jan Carlson spearheaded the spinoff of the Swedish supplier’s active-safety business into a new publicly traded company, Veoneer. In March, he was named Veoneer’s first CEO. Carlson talked with Automotive News Europe Correspondent Peter Sigal about why he believes Veoneer is ideally positioned to take advantage of the technology-heavy trends driving the automotive industry. How would you describe Veoneer to someone who doesn't know anything about the company? We're probably the world's biggest pure-play supplier in the area of sensors and decision-making software. We are clearly a technology company based on what we will do, but we are a technology company with the heritage of being a safety company. That is probably a unique position. When you sat down with the leaders of Autoliv 18 months ago and said, 'What does our future ...