BMW announces autonomous partner

Just hours after the German government approved Level Three autonomous driving laws, BMW has announced it will team up with Delphi to put its own self-driving technology into production.

While Audi and Mercedes-Benz are believed to be closest to full Level Three autonomy, BMW today revealed it, and its autonomous cooperation partners, Intel and Mobileye would be joined by Delphi to industrialise its Level Four and Level Five autonomous systems.

The aim is for the four organisations to cooperate in bringing a BMW-branded self-driving platform to production, scalable across a number of high-end models, initially, but to even transcend the car industry into other industries.

“From the very beginning we designed our cooperation on a non-exclusive platform for this technology of the future,” the BMW Group’s board member for development, Klaus Fröhlich, said.

“With the onboarding of Delphi we significantly strengthen our development of the automated driving and do a future step in spreading this technology across the industry.”

It isn’t the first time Delphi and BMW have teamed up on autonomy, with the electrical supplier giant already teaming with the Bavarians on a prototype compute platform.

“This is a great opportunity for Delphi to use its technical depth and experience with automated driving and electrical architecture to help the cooperation develop and deploy at scale. Our close working relationship with all three partners serves as a solid foundation for a success,” Delphi President and CEO, Kevin Clark, said.

The cooperation agreement will see the four companies working on sensor fusion, perception and high-performance computing to join all of the sensor data together.

BMW, Intel and Tesla refugee Mobileye joined forces in 2016 to collaborate on a self-driving platform that could even be used by other automotive brands, which is where Delphi comes in.

The three initial project partners are relying on Delphi as a system integrator to bring the technology they’ve already developed to other OEMs as quickly as possible.
“The partnership between BMW, Intel and Mobileye continues to break new ground in the auto industry,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.

“In less than one year the joint teams have made substantial progress to deliver a scalable platform for autonomous driving and are on path to deliver 40 pilot cars in second half of this year.

“Adding Delphi as an integration partner will help to accelerate the introduction of autonomous cars on the streets from multiple carmakers and offer differentiation to customers.”

This engagement between Delphi and the Cooperation Partners is non-exclusive. The Cooperation Partners are in the process of onboarding additional integration and development partners to support future OEM customer needs.

“Collaboration and inclusion across multiple automakers and suppliers is the best approach to developing a safe, cost-efficient, and fast-to-market solution for autonomous driving,” Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua said.

“Delphi’s expertise in the field, as well as long history of integrating complex systems, makes them a very appropriate choice to join this cooperation.”