BMW AG Board of Management Chairman Harald Krüger has been telling us for more than a year that the future of BMW includes self-driving cars. BMW has been developing the technology and acquiring companies to facilitate the ultimate objective of bringing self-driving cars to market. Two big partnerships recently announced will help BMW realize those promises, and not all that far in the future.
Computing giant Intel and Mobileye, a major player in sensor devices, are joining BMW on its quest for a safe and profitable self-driving car. Their goal and common vision are to speed up development by aligning the industry on a standards-based platform and make fully autonomous driving a market reality by 2021.
BMW’s iNext will be its proof of concept and possibly, its first commercially available self-driving vehicle. At the very least it will serve as the basis for fleets of autonomous vehicles for individual use and for automated ridesharing in urban areas.
The case for the self-driving car always starts with safety and reducing accidents and follows up with ease of use and allowing passengers to make productive use of their driving time, much like train commuters do, only in a more direct, comfortable, versatile, and personal setting.
According to BMW, it’s not enough to have a car that can follow the car in front, stay in a lane, and brake when needed. This is called level 2 or “hands off.” Most automakers already have or shortly will have vehicles that can do that now. BMW wants to move quickly to level 3: “eyes off,” then level 4: “mind off,” and finally, level 5: “driver off,” in which a driver is not required at all.
Of course you are asking why would BMW, a company that built its reputation making sporty, high-performance “ultimate driving machines” want to write the driver out of the equation. Well, it doesn’t. Chairman Krüger has stated, “BMW will always offer an emotional and joyful driving experience.”
On the other hand, Krüger also said that BMW’s focus on future mobility would be autonomous driving, connectivity, electric and/or emissions-free, and sharing, especially for urban mobility. It makes us a little nervous that “fun” or “performance” did not make the BMW future focus list, but maybe we’re being overly sensitive.
BMW, Intel, and Mobileye expect to have a self-driving demonstrator in the “near-term” with fleet testing by 2017. That sounds pretty ambitious, given that the beginning of 2017 is less than six months away.
Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Technical Officer Professor Amnon Shashua obviously expects things to happen quickly. “Today marks an important milestone for the automotive industry as we enter a world of new mobility. Together with BMW Group and Intel, Mobileye is laying the groundwork for the technology of future mobility that enables fully autonomous driving to become a reality within the next few years,” said Shashua. He continued, “Mobileye is proud to contribute our expertise in sensing, localization, and driver policy to enable fully autonomous driving in this cooperation. The processing of sensing, like our capabilities to understand the driving scene through a single camera already, will be deployed on Mobileye’s latest system-on-chip, the EyeQ®5, and the collaborative development of fusion algorithms will be deployed on Intel computing platforms. In addition, Mobileye Road Experience Management (REM) technology will provide real-time precise localization and model the driving scene to essentially support fully autonomous driving.”
Future BMW self-driving cars may not have an “Intel Inside” decal on the fender, but they will have Intel power inside nonetheless. It will be contributing computing power that scales from Intel® Atom™ to Intel® Xeon™ processors delivering up to a total of 100 teraflops of performance without having to rewrite code.
“Highly autonomous cars and everything they connect to will require powerful and reliable electronic brains to make them smart enough to navigate traffic and avoid accidents,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. “This partnership between BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye will help us to quickly deliver on our vision to reinvent the driving experience. We bring a broad set of in-vehicle and cloud computing, connectivity, safety and security, and machine-learning assets to this collaboration enabling a truly end-to-end solution.”
Harald Krüger reemphasized the BMW philosophy, explaining, “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. 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.”
That’s fine for BMW’s philosophy on automated driving. Our philosophy is that automated cars are acceptable as long as the self-driving mode has an off switch and then a Sport mode. Or better yet, we should always be able to buy a new M car that still needs a driver.—Scott Blazey
[Photos courtesy of BMW AG.]
