BMW partners with Intel to manufacture driverless cars
Automaker BMW has teamed up with chip giant Intel and automated vision system Mobileye to jointly develop a new breed of driverless cars by 2021.
Each party will pool their expertise to create a vehicle capable of navigating itself without recourse to human interaction along both motorways and congested inner city areas.
Instead of a road revolution however the trio will push for evolution with a gradual replacement of human controlled components in existing vehicle designs as new computer and sensor systems are developed.
The holy grail of this work would be the creation of an unmanned vehicle capable of operating reliably for use in haulage and taxi services.
Along the road to this destination BMW intends to release a ‘highly automated’ prototype as early as this year with more extensive tests following in 2017, most probably within the electric iNext range.
The futuristic fleet had an inauspicious launch however after US officials announced that they had launched an investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S, with self-driving technology in the frame as a potential contributing factor.