At last month’s CES, the Korean carmaker Hyundai has announced that it plans to develop autonomous vehicles with Aurora by 2021. Now the German media has learned that the Koreans are also interested in a cooperation with BMW and want to participate in the existing alliance between the BMW Group, the chip giant Intel and the camera experts of MobilEye.
BMW has been involved in a partnership with Intel and Mobileye for quite some time now, in search of true Level 5 autonomous tech for future vehicles. BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye announced in January 2017 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.
With the Korean Hyundai Group, which also includes the brands Kia and Genesis, another major car maker in the consortium for autonomous driving would be involved. Together, the BMW Group, Hyundai and Fiat Chrysler Automotive stand for sales of well over ten million cars per year and could bring, in large quantities, autonomously driving cars on the road within a short time.
According to information from the Automobilwoche, talks have been going on for several weeks, and a deal seems to be possible in the first quarter of 2018. The founders of the consortium had stressed from the beginning that they were open to further development partners.
The jointly developed technology will later be offered to other car makers, but these would only be customers and no longer development partners.
With the BMW iNext, the BMW Group has announced a car for the year 2021 that will drive autonomously. Vehicles such as the 5 Series, 6 Series GTs, 7 Series and X3s have already taking over the driver’s tasks for some time now and can now independently realize both the longitudinal and the lane guidance. However, today’s systems are not yet legally capable of relieving the driver of his responsibility, so he has to remain alert all the time.
