Renowned luxury car manufacturer BMW has entered into a partnership with two suppliers Mobileye and Intel to introduce 40 self-test vehicles.
Targeted for a launch during the latter half of 2017, the three partners announced their plans of deployment at the CES on Wednesday. It is worth recalling that BMW had earlier announced its plans of partnership with the two suppliers in July last year.The partners are planning to make their cars based on a concept called scalable architecture developed by them to support autonomous driving. This scalability allows the system to be used either as elementary pick and choose modules at the entry level or even as a complex autonomous driving system that gives clients access to only product experience and user design.
The primary partner BMW stated that the testing would take place worldwide under real traffic conditions. As a result, the 40 planned vehicles will be put to test in over one location. Additionally, Brian Krzanich made a press announcement that partnership with BMW and Mobileye has proved to be beneficial for the chip making company in terms of cost and development speed involved in introducing autonomous systems to the market. It is obvious that Intel’s role in the partnership is to take control of the computing components while BMW will be responsible for the car’s safety validation, dynamics and driving controls. On the other hand, Mobileye will focus on incorporating the sensors and computer vision processing technologies for the sensor fusion model.
BMW is already planning to make use of autonomous technology for its upcoming iNEXT model slated for a 2021 release. However, the partnership is likely to bring out hardware samples for its joint venture with the software updates even earlier in the next few years. It is no surprise that the car maker is joining the autonomous testing bandwagon this year. However, the combined skills of the three companies can prove to be a role model for smaller enterprises interested in executing selfdriving but lacking the necessary resources to build their own systems to look out for joint ventures.