This past week, Lear has dropped $320mn on Xevo, a connected car software provider that is present in some 25mn cars, and ZF has bought trucking ADAS slinger Wabco, for €6bn ($6.74bn). The next three years are going to be full of similar deals, as the OEMs, and the automakers too, try to buy their way into the lead, on the back of new technologies – as the industry grapples with electrification, pollution regulations, and autonomous driving. There is still plenty of room in the automotive sector for the kinds of massive acquisitions seen in the semiconductor market. The automakers themselves seem keen to expand into the realm traditionally governed by the OEMs that supplied them, and among the OEMs,…