BMW wants keep its position in the relative forefront of new vehicles technologies and, to bring autonomous capabilities to its range of cars in the near future, has partnered with leading chipmaker Intel and active safety tech specialist Mobileye.
Autonomous driving is a word that’s been thrown around quite bit in recent years, and roving four-wheeled lounge concepts notwithstanding, typically would involve an intelligent network of cars and perhaps even infrastructure that cooperates with each other to pilot the vehicle as well as provide a data stream that’s continually being analysed to both take the actual driving load off the driver entirely as well as plot the quickest and most efficient route to a given destination.
It’s a complicated problem and one that will likely not reach its peak until we’re well into the next decade. However, it has become increasingly clear that that goal is reached through collaboration and not via proprietary solutions – better or worse.
In that vein, BMW’s announcement that by 2021 they plan to offer fully autonomous vehicles with the help of Intel and Mobileye does seem like a viability – with Intel providing the vast computing power needed to craft a sufficiently intelligent car, and Mobileye providing the components to acts the car’s sensory organs, so to speak - providing accurate, high quality input for the car’s presumably Intel-based brain to process and use to drive the car.
This would allow drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel (level 3 autonomy) but also would not need them for any input whatsoever, freeing the driver to be just another occupant (level 4 autonomy). This, they hope, will technically bring them within earshot of of the “driver off” (or level 5) autonomy, with the car not needing a human driver inside at all.
There will be more announcements to follow as the trio of companies follow through on their deliverables. In the near term, they will demonstrate an autonomous test drive with a highly automated driving (HAD) prototype. In 2017 the platform will extend to fleets with extended autonomous test drives.
The BMW iNEXT will serve as the base for the BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy as well as their fleets of fully self-driving vehicles both on highways and in dense urban areas.
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