We’ve told you before that BMW has plans to release a new electric self-driving car by 2021, and it looks like the German automaker is quite serious about this upcoming project, as it has recently decided to partner up with Intel in order to make it a reality. In order to be able to build the required platform for these future cars, BMW also relies on the expertise of computer vision / sensing company Mobileye, and the three companies have a good chance to achieve wonderful results that would help create an open industry platform. This means that other car manufacturers could use their findings in order to make autonomous cars more reliable, safer and more widely available.
It makes sense to turn to Intel for this, as the company has been working on autonomous driving technologies for quite a few years now. The end goal would be to create a system that wouldn’t require us to keep our hands on the wheel at all, something that’s currently a requirement for Tesla cars. In order to reach their 2021 goal, the companies have agreed to “deliverables and milestones,” which means that we’re likely to see an autonomous test drive for a “highly automated driving” prototype very soon.
