BMW and Intel’s driverless car has hit the roads for testing, packed with MobileEye tech that will make it one of the safest automated cars around.
40 BMW 7-series in total will head onto the streets of Silicon Valley, originating from Intel’s Advanced Vehicle Lab. From there, BMW and Intel hopes the cars will be able to clock up 155 million test miles over the next few years, before they’re ready for consumers.
MobileEye’s technology integrates cameras, Lidar and radar to give a full 360-degree view of the road and surroundings. It collects the data (Intel reckons 4 terabytes every half an hour) and processes the data to work out how to react to road conditions. A proportion of the data will be beamed back to Intel’s lab to improve mapping and help the company build better features into future models.
Although there’s still a long way to go before BMW and Intel are even close to clocking up the same number of hours on the road as Google or Tesla, Intel’s general manager of Automated Driving Solutions Group thinks it has the scope to change the entire industry.
“The single most important factor in autonomous driving is data – how best to process it, manage it, move it, store it, share it and learn from it. From PCs to data centers and everywhere in between, no company’s silicon has analysed, computed and moved more data than Intel’s,” he said in a blog post.
“As we move down the road toward autonomous cars, the data challenge will become much more complex and require new ways to work with data inside the vehicle, throughout the network and across the cloud.”
