Las Vegas, Jan. 4, 2017 – BMW Group, Intel and
Mobileye today announced 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. Revealing this at a podium
discussion held during a joint press conference at CES, the companies
further explained that 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. 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.
“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. Within the car, the Intel GO
solution offers a scalable development and compute platform for
critical functions including sensor fusion, driving policy,
environment modeling, path planning and decision making. In the data
center, Intel GO offers a wide range of technologies ranging from the
high performance Intel® Xeon® processors, to Intel® Arria® 10 FPGAs
and Intel® Solid State Drives to the Intel® Nervana™ platform for
artificial intelligence that provides a powerful machine and deep
learning training and simulation infrastructure required for the
autonomous driving 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.
Mobileye will further collaborate with the BMW Group to develop the
sensor fusion solution, creating a full model of the environment
surrounding the vehicle, using input from vision, radar, and lidar
sensors. As well as establishing a driving policy, including
Mobileye’s reinforcement learning algorithms used to endow the vehicle
system with the artificial intelligence required to safely negotiate
complex driving situations.
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.
Link to live streaming of the joint press conference will be
available on Facebook and on the BMW Group website: http://www.live.bmwgroup.com.
This will be available as replay as well.
#futureofdriving2021
#bmwintelmobileye
If you have any queries, please contact
:
BMW Group Business and
Finance Communications
Max-Morten Borgmann
Tel. +49 89 382 24118
max-morten.borgmann@
bmwgroup.com
BMW Group Innovation and
Design Communications
Manfred Poschenrieder
Tel. +49 176 601 28720
Manfred.Poschenrieder@
bmwgroup.com
Intel Corporation
Danielle Mann
Tel. +1 973 997 1154
danielle.mann@intel.com
Intel Corporation
Markus Weingartner
Tel. +49 89 9914 3145
markus.weingartner@intel.com
Mobileye N.V.
Dan Galves
CCO / SVP
Tel. +1 917 960 1525
dan.galves@mobileye.com
Mobileye N.V.
Alexis Blais
MobileyePR@icrinc.com
About BMW Group
With its three brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce, the BMW Group is the
world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles
and also provides premium financial and mobility services. As a global
company, the BMW Group operates 31 production and assembly facilities
in 14 countries and has a global sales network in more than 140 countries.
In 2015, the BMW Group sold approximately 2.247 million cars and
nearly 137,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax for the
financial year 2015 was approximately € 9.22 billion on revenues
amounting to € 92.18 billion. As of 31 December 2015, the BMW Group
had a workforce of 122,244 employees.
The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term
thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established
ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain,
comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to
conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy.
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) expands the boundaries of technology to make the
most amazing experiences possible. Information about Intel can be
found at newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.
About Mobileye
Mobileye N.V. is the global leader in the development of computer
vision and machine learning, data analysis, localization and mapping
for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and autonomous driving. Our
technology keeps passengers safer on the roads, reduces the risks of
traffic accidents, saves lives and has the potential to revolutionize
the driving experience by enabling autonomous driving. Our proprietary
software algorithms and EyeQ® chips perform detailed interpretations
of the visual field in order to anticipate possible collisions with
other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, animals, debris and other
obstacles. Mobileye’s products are also able to detect roadway
markings such as lanes, road boundaries, barriers and similar items;
identify and read traffic signs, directional signs and traffic lights;
create a RoadBook™ of localized drivable paths and visual landmarks
using REM™; and provide mapping for autonomous driving. Our products
are or will be integrated into car models from more than 25 global
automakers. Our products are also available in the aftermarket.
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such as “believes,” “intends,” “expects,” “projects,” “anticipates,”
and “future” or similar expressions are intended to identify
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