BMW looking to work with others11 Dec 2018 19:38
A BMW exec explains why billions of dollars are burned in AD development, Waymo ushers in a new era and Tesla once again makes questionable headlines: read our weekly analysis of the most important news in automated driving!
If you were following events at the LA Auto Show last week, you probably noted the headlines surrounding the self-driving iNext vehicle BMW which was featured. Newsworthy? No doubt about it. But to me, some things that Klaus Fröhlich, BMW’s head of development, told Bloomberg at the LA Auto Show were far more revealing.
Fröhlich announced that BMW is currently talking with “two or three big carmakers” about joining BMW’s driverless car alliance. BMW initially forged a consortium with Intel and Mobileye, which was later joined by Fiat Chrysler and Continental, among others. According to Fröhlich, many companies now realize they will have to discard earlier versions of their tech and replace it with jointly developed software. “They have to invest the first billion, already knowing that this tech will not survive,” he said. “You have a lot of sunken costs.” Now that’s probably one of the most compelling arguments for creating driverless car alliances that I have heard so far.
In a rather straight-talking manner, Fröhlich also shared his view of who will become the world’s leader in automated driving. “China has good companies, software, hardware companies; they are expanding to very powerful chipsets, and there’s a political will, it’s very clear,” Froehlich said. The USA, he feels, lags behind due to its patchwork legal situation in different states, which leads to “a little bit of anarchy”. Even worse, he considers European regulators too slow in updating laws to catch up with other regions.
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