BMW will dispatch a fleet of autonomous vehicles to US and European cities in the second half of this year, the next step in its partnership with Mobileye and Intel to introduce fully self-driving vehicles by 2021.
The German carmaker will put 40 of its 7 Series sedans on the road and train them to drive in urban areas, Klaus Froehlich, BMW’s head of development, said in an interview. The goal is to apply the gathered data toward producing the iNext, which will supplant the 7 Series as the BMW brand’s flagship model and be capable of full autonomy four years from now.
Carmakers and technology companies are rushing to form partnerships to compete against the likes of Alphabet ’s Google, which has clocked two million self-driving miles on public roads, and Tesla, with 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles. BMW is appealing to other carmakers to adopt its approach to help shoulder research costs, speed development by sharing data and ensure they don’t become also-rans.
Research sharing
“Those who reach the finish line before you will have their tech become the basis of standardisation,” Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said. “This is why sharing is important.”
BMW will be following Uber and Volvo in putting autonomous cars on the road, with the latter two companies partnering on test vehicles in Pittsburgh and Arizona. Other carmakers have been reluctant so far to heed BMW’s call for adopting its platform. Rival Daimler has said it prefers to develop its own technology.
Enabling vehicles to navigate without human input through cities requires them to see and understand complex situations more like people do. Jerusalem-based Mobileye brings expertise in cameras that model the surroundings while California-based Intel wields computing capabilities to power artificial intelligence. The companies released details on Wednesday in conjunction with CES 2017, the consumer-technology show in Las Vegas.
Network technology
“If everybody would use the same network, it will be best,” Mr Froehlich said. “At the beginning, I think only premium cars will be able to afford such technology.”
Carmakers could participate by buying sensors to install in their cars, or go deeper with equipment that helps crowd-source data from an autonomous-vehicle fleet, said Kathy Winter, vice-president and general manager of Intel’s Automated Driving Division.
While Munich-based BMW’s main target is individual car-owners, the technology will be available for ride-sharing fleets as well, Mr Froehlich said. Car manufacturers are pushing into so-called mobility services such as car-sharing and ride-hailing to counter alternatives to private vehicle ownership.– (Bloomberg)
