BMW to Release 40 Autonomous Vehicles in 2017

BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye announced Wednesday that a fleet of approximately 40 autonomous BMW vehicles will be on the roads by the second half of 2017, demonstrating the significant advancements made by the three companies towards fully autonomous driving.

The BMW 7 Series will employ cutting-edge Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials starting in the U.S. and Europe.

This news follows the partnership that was announced between the BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye in July of last year.

[ Also Read: BMW to Use IBM Watson to Release Cars of the Future ]

The companies have since developed a scalable architecture that can be adopted by other automotive developers and carmakers to pursue state of the art designs and create differentiated brands.

The offerings scale from individual key integrated modules to a complete end-to-end solution providing a wide range of differentiated consumer experiences.

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 high performance computing elements that span from the vehicle to the data center. And Mobileye contributes its proprietary EyeQ 5 computer vision processor offering automotive-grade functional safety and low-power performance.

To further propel the development of the autonomous platform, the partnership plans to release hardware samples and software updates in the upcoming years.

The BMW iNEXT model, which will be introduced in 2021, will be the foundation for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy. Following this vehicle, a range of highly automated models from all BMW Group brands will follow.