BMW’s plans towards an autonomous driving world were reinforced today in China where the company announced their intentions to join the Apollo, the open autonomous driving platform by Baidu. The MoU marks the beginning of a new partnership on autonomous driving between the BMW Group and Baidu.
Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for development, said: “Strong ties between automotive and tech leaders are our key to success in the marathon towards autonomous driving. We are striving for consistent technology standards globally to overcome today’s regional discrepancy regarding speed of implementation and regulatory framework. With BMW Group and Baidu joining forces we can significantly accelerate the alignment of specific requirements and technological approaches to turn the vision of autonomous driving into reality for Chinese customers very soon.”
For the last few years, BMW has focused their development on technology solutions for Level 3 to Level 4/5 (highly to fully automated driving), as well as for advanced driving assistance systems (Level 2). Currently, the company has a fleet of autonomous driving vehicles in Europe who are part of a daily testing cycle.
Apollo is an open platform that provides a comprehensive, secure and reliable solution that supports all major features and functions of an autonomous vehicle. Since its launch in July, 2017, Apollo has brought together 118 global partners across both automotive and technology industries.
Here is a story we did last year from the BMW Technology Office in Silicon Valley.
