BMW, Intel, Mobileye tie up for driverless car

02 Jul 2016

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BMW AG, Intel Corp, and Mobileye NV are working to develop autonomous-car technology which they hope will become an industry standard platform for safe automated driving, the companies announced on Friday.

BMW plans to integrate Intel and Mobileye technologies into its ''iNext'' platform, the company's target vehicle for fully automated driverless cars in 2021.

What sets this announcement apart is the intention to provide a standard open platform, enabling other companies to leverage engineering and expertise from this team to produce their own driverless vehicles.

Intel said that this project will require hundreds of people from the company, with a spend of hundreds of millions of dollars. These three companies could potentially become a dream team that will drive many innovations needed for fully autonomous vehicles.

To drive home the point that this is a very big deal, the three companies brought their top execs to Münich, Germany, for the announcement, with the chief executive of Intel, Brian Krzanich, the chairman of Mobileye, Amnon Shashua, and the chairman of BMW, Harald Krüger, for the announcement.

The companies intend to produce and publish the technical specifications of the platform they are jointly developing, and have a set of deliverable and milestones they intend to share.

This deal is a win for Intel, as it puts them at the forefront of autonomous development with one of the most prestigious brands in the auto industry. The agreement encompasses all the degrees from L3 (eyes off), L4 (hands off) to L5 fully autonomous driving. This is far as one can go, that is, to L5 without a human, and this is the farthest that Intel has gone with any car manufacturer.

Most of Intel's recent automotive wins have been with in-car navigation and entertainment with Hyundai , Infiniti, and Kia. Five years ago, Intel opened a German auto technology centre, which could have been the precursor to this deal.

From an historical chipmaker perspective, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are getting most of the credit for automotive electronics advancements and have racked up wins in many automotive areas. Collaborating with a leader like BMW will put Intel in a much better position to expand beyond their current automotive niche into what is becoming a data center on wheels, as Forbes magazine points out. Areas of exclusivity are unknown at this point.

To realise their dreams, these three must overcome two challenges, in addition to mastering the engineering complexity of the task at hand. First, Intel will need to deliver the efficient compute engines to fit in a car that normally require racks of servers in a data centre.

Second, the companies will need to enable and nurture an ecosystem of engineering teams and auto companies to embrace their open platform.

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