BMW (and MINI) have positioned themselves in the forefront of autonomous car technology with an aggressive timeline and recent series of partnerships. This latest rounds out the stable of partners needed for BMW to fulfill its promise to bring a fully autonomous car to the marketplace within 5 years.
Official Release: The BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye (“Cooperation Partners”) announce their intention to onboard Delphi as a development partner and system integrator for their State-of-the-Art autonomous driving platform. The four partners intend to jointly deploy a cooperation model to deliver and scale the developed solutions to the broader OEM automotive industry and potentially other industries.
Delphi has already provided a prototype compute platform to the BMW Group and is working together with Intel and Mobileye in the areas of perception, sensor fusion, and high performance automated driving computing.
In July 2016 BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye announced that they are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles become a reality and are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021. The Cooperation Partners 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.
System integrators, such as Delphi, are critical for the go to market strategy of the joint solution to reach multiple automotive OEMs quickly. A key role for Delphi will be the integration of the solution delivered by BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye into OEM vehicle architectures. Additionally, Delphi may also provide required hardware components such as sensors as well as specific customization efforts and applications for differentiation.
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.
Executive Quotes
“From the very beginning we designed our cooperation on a non-exclusive platform for this technology of the future. 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,” stated Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for Development.
“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.”
“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,” said Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua. “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.”
“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,” said Kevin Clark, President and CEO of Delphi.