The top-of-the-range carmaker announced it is teaming up with the American computer chip firm Intel and the Israeli technology company Mobileye to develop autonomous cars.
“BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality,” the three firms said in a statement.
“The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.”
On Friday, officials of the three companies met at the BMW Group Headquarters in Munich to announce their partnership, saying they are committed to producing driverless cars in the next few years.
Aiming to develop tools that allow drivers to take “their hands off the steering wheel,” the firms are confident of coming up with an automated driving technology that will make travel easier and safer.
“The goal of the collaboration is to develop future-proofed solutions that enable the drivers to not only take their hands off the steering wheel, but reach the so called “eyes off” (level 3) and ultimately the “mind off” (level 4) level transforming the driver’s in-car time into leisure or work time,” they said.
“This level of autonomy would enable the vehicle, on a technical level, to achieve the final stage of traveling “driver off” (level 5) without a human driver inside. This establishes the opportunity for self-driving fleets by 2021 and lays the foundation for entirely new business models in a connected, mobile world.”
Called the BMW iNEXT, the driverless vehicle will be fully developed in five years, according to the companies.
Mobileye, @BMW & @Intel will bring driverless cars to the road in 2021. Read more here: pic.twitter.com/TfVb6zZFsO
— Mobileye (@Mobileye) July 1, 2016
“Our goal is already clearly defined: to be No. 1 in autonomous driving,” BMW CEO Harald Krüger said. “This collaboration underscores our commitment to achieve that goal.”
Mobileye, a worldwide pioneer in the development of vision-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that provide warnings to prevent collision, said it is proud to share its expertise in this collaboration.
“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 Mobileye co-founder and chairman Amnon Shashua.
Semiconductor chip giant Intel said the partnership will allow it to deliver its vision of reinventing driving experience through bringing “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.”
“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 CE0 Brian K.
The move of the three companies comes amid the growing interest in automated driving with a number of firms conducting tests over the past years.
