According to numerous reports over the years, BMW is rather interested in making autonomous vehicles and Intel—being the world’s largest and highest valued semiconductor chip maker— definitely wants to get in on the driverless cars action. Now, it seems like the two companies will work together on creating driver-free cars. As sources from Germany reported earlier today, BMW will soon announce an autonomous cars partnership with Intel and Mobileye. Given how the latter company specializes in advanced collision detection systems, it’s to be presumed Mobileye will be the party that will work on the technological aspect of this project while Intel and BMW will provide it with the necessary chips and cars to make functioning driverless cars a reality as soon as possible.
Furthermore, Reuters’ analysts stated that BMW, Intel, and Mobileye could easily have the first fruits of their partnership driving on roads “early in the next decade”. More specifically, even BMW itself has recently stated that it’s planning to launch a premium autonomous vehicle in 2021. Of course, the European automakers are not the only ones with plans on manufacturing driverless vehicles in the near future. Chinese firms are strongly interested in developing such machinations and both Apple and Google have been racing to release an autonomous vehicle for years. Naturally, this isn’t just a simple tech race as most consumers want automation in their vehicles and have repeatedly said so.
The official announcement of this collaboration is expected to be made by BMW, Intel, and Mobileye at a joint news conference this Friday. BMW CEO Harald Krueger, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, and Mobileye chairman and CTO Amon Shashua are all said to be attending the event. The fact that BMW decided to collaborate with Mobileye is not surprising as the German automaker has been the largest customer of the Israeli company for close to a decade. On the other hand, numerous experts speculate that this three-way partnership may signal the end of a year-long collaboration between the Jerusalem-based Mobileye and the French-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics. At the moment, all four parties have declined to comment on these reports.