BMW, Intel and Mobileye will road test autonomous cars by mid-2017

BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye has just announced that they will be road testing around 40 autonomous BMW vehicles by mid-2017. This is the best confirmation of the significant advancements that the three companies have achieved towards autonomous driving. The BMW 7 Series will be using cutting-edge Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials starting in the U.S. and Europe.

“Making autonomous driving a reality for our customers is the shared ambition behind our cooperation with Intel and Mobileye. This partnership has all of the skills and talent necessary to overcome the enormous technological challenges ahead and commercialize self-driving vehicles. Therefore, we are already thinking in terms of scalability and welcome other companies – manufacturers, suppliers or technology companies – to participate and contribute to our autonomous platform. This year our fleet of vehicles will already test this joint technology globally under real traffic conditions. This is a significant step towards the introduction of the BMW iNEXT in 2021, which will be the BMW Group’s first fully autonomous vehicle,” stated Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for Development.

“From an industry perspective, we are already seeing savings and speed in development by sharing development costs and in pooling resources to develop a complete autonomous platform. The car to cloud system will perform with consistent, predictable behavior and is validated to the highest level of safety,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. “That’s why this partnership is breaking new ground. We have established a dedicated team with clear, shared goals and a culture of innovation and agility and accountability.”

“Over the last six months, we have made very good progress in designing a state-of-the-art solution for autonomous driving on both highways and in urban areas. The solution has been defined in a scalable manner to allow affiliate automakers to meet their unique needs,” said Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua.

As part of this partnership, the BMW Group will be responsible for driving control and dynamics, evaluation of overall functional safety including setting up a high performance simulation engine, overall component integration, production of prototypes and eventually scaling the platform via deployment partners.

Intel brings to the partnership innovative high performance computing elements that span from the vehicle to the data center. The newly launched Intel® GO™ solution for autonomous driving offers world class processor and FPGA technologies for the most efficient balance of performance and power, while meeting the stringent thermal and safety requirements of the automotive industry.

Mobileye contributes its proprietary EyeQ®5 high-performance computer vision processor offering automotive-grade functional safety and low-power performance. The EyeQ®5 is responsible for processing and interpretation of input from the 360-degree surround view vision sensors as well as localization. EyeQ®5, in combination with Intel CPU and FPGA technologies, which forms the Central Computing Platform to be integrated into each autonomous vehicle.