FREMONT, CA: BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye announce collaboration to deliver fully automated driving solutions into series production by 2021.
The dominant leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries aim to create an open platform for the next generation of cars to be developed.
Automated driving promises a great future for changing the lives of society and people for the better. However, the road to develop a fully autonomous world is complex and will require future transportation providers to harness rapidly evolving technologies, collaborate with totally new partners, and prepare for disruptive opportunities.
Leveraging BMW Group’s autonomous strategy the BMW iNEXT model will be the foundation for the fleets of fully autonomous vehicles for both urban and highway environments for purpose of automated ride sharing.
The common platform by the three companies will address level 3 to 5 automated driving. They include solutions that enable the driver to not need to use the steering wheel, not look at the road with “eyes off” or level 3 automated driving and ultimately “mind-off” or level 4 automated driving, transforming the driver’s in-car time into leisure. These levels of autonomy would enable the vehicle, on a technical level, to achieve the final stage of traveling “driver off” or level 5 automated driving without a human driver inside.
The platform will be made available to multiple car vendors and other industries that would benefit from autonomous machines and deep machine learning.
Intel’s comprehensive portfolio of technologies enables billions of smart devices to be connected by providing compute power that scales from Intel Atom to Intel Xeon processors to deliver a total of 100 teraflops of power without having to rewrite code.
The companies will demonstrate an autonomous test drive with a highly automated driving (HAD) prototype in the near future.
“At the BMW Group we always strive for technological leadership. This partnership underscores our Strategy Number ONE > NEXT to shape the individual mobility of the future,” states Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG. “Following our investment in high-definition live map technology at HERE, the combined expertise of Intel, Mobileye and the BMW Group will deliver the next core building block to bring fully automated driving technology to the street. We have already showcased such groundbreaking solutions in our VISION NEXT 100 vehicle concepts. With this technological leap forward, we are offering our customers a whole new level of sheer driving pleasure whilst pioneering new concepts for premium mobility.”
