Although he's taking it one quarter at a time, BlackBerry CEO John Chen is pleased with the company's progress as of late — enough so that he revealed during a recent conference call that the company would be releasing software related to self-driving cars in January 2016.
When Bloomberg asked Chen during an interview Friday if BlackBerry would consider partnering with companies that are already working on self-driving cars such as Tesla, Google and reportedly Apple, he responded with a ringing endorsement of a yes.
"Absolutely! I'd love to do that," Chen told Bloomberg. "We had a couple of partnership announcements in the past couple of weeks regarding this. Not the big names that you laid out. We work with Google on a number of areas, already. I'd love to extend this. Our QNX technology, our software platform, actually works with the Apple car strategy as well as the Google [car's strategy] and I'd love to be able to work with Tesla ... and I'm sure the folks are talking to each other by now."
Chen also took the time to explain that, while it might be unbeknownst to many, BlackBerry is already a key player in the auto industry and has been for quite some time, giving the company all the more reason to broaden its scope within the space.
"So, we are very much involved in many cars in the industry, many car vendors, providers," he said. "We are in 250 models. Our software is currently in 60 million cars running around. It's natural for us to step into the next generation of automobiles."
