July 5, 2016—BMW announced Friday that it is teaming up with Intel and Mobileye to bring fully autonomous vehicles into production by 2021.
The three companies say autonomous cars will make travel safer and easier.
BMW said the goal will require complex solutions for every part of the vehicle, from the door locks to the data center. The BMW iNEXT is the foundation of the project and will be the basis for several different models. The vehicles will also be optimized for automated ride-sharing services.
"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," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said. "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."
"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," Harald Krüger, chairman of the board of management of BMW AG, said. "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."
The goal of the collaboration is to develop technologies that allow drivers to take their “eyes off” (Level 3 autonomous vehicle), “mind off” (Level 4), and “driver off” (Level 5) where the vehicle will drive without a human driver inside. These technologies will help the companies reach new business models in a connected, mobile world.
