The two companies also want to work on traffic optimization (a key development for an autonomous-automobile future) and new machine learning processes. The announcement was made at a 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, and said that Volkswagen specialists in San Francisco and Munich will work with Google's universal quantum computers.

"Quantum computing technology opens up new dimensions and represents the fast-track for future-oriented topics," said Volkswagen's CIO Martin Hofmann in a statement. "We at Volkswagen want to be among the first to use quantum computing for corporate processes as soon as this technology is commercially available. Thanks to our cooperation with Google, we have taken a major step towards this goal."