BMW has just announced that the brand has teamed up with Intel and Mobileye to make fully self-driving vehicles a reality. The German carmaker, in fact, is looking to bring fully automated driving technology into series production by 2021.
The iNEXT model will be the foundation for BMW’s autonomous driving strategy and set the basis for fleets of fully autonomous vehicles. The vehicles will not only ply on highways but also in urban environments for the purpose of automated ridesharing solutions.
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. 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.
The joint venture has already expressed its commitment to strive for an industry standard and define an open platform for autonomous driving. The common platform will address level 3 to level 5 automated driving and will be made available to multiple car vendors and other industries that could benefit from autonomous machines and deep machine learning.
The advent of autonomous driving technology means that the relationship between a driver and a car’s user interface is of crucial significance. A safe handover of control, then, is the keystone of any new trustworthy autonomous driving technology. This probably explains the painfully extensive testing that BMW is currently undertaking before it makes its fully autonomous driving tech available for general public.
