Don’t you just love it when automotive companies join hands with tech companies? Definitely only great things can emerge from such a collaboration. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), the group responsible for brands such as Fiat, Lancia, Maserati, Jeep and much more, has joined hands with BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye to look towards the development of autonomous vehicles. The group signed a memorandum of understanding.
FCA will bring engineering and technical resources to the group who each have their own individual strength and will co-locate engineers in Germany as well as other locations for this cooperation. This will also bring long-time experience in North America thanks to the Chrysler connection.
“In order to advance autonomous driving technology, it is vital to form partnerships among automakers, technology providers and suppliers,” said FCA Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne. “Joining this cooperation will enable FCA to directly benefit from the synergies and economies of scale that are possible when companies come together with a common vision and objective.”
In July 2016, BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye announced that they were joining forces to make self-driving vehicles a reality by collaborating to bring solutions for highly automated driving (Level 3) and fully automated driving (Level 4/5) into production by 2021. Since then, they have been designing and developing a scalable architecture that can be used by multiple automakers around the world, while at the same time maintaining each automaker’s unique brand identities.
The group says that their plans to deploy 40 autonomous test vehicles on the road by the end of the year still remains on schedule. The group will also benefit from the data obtained by Intel and Mobileye’s fleet of 100 test vehicles.
“The two factors that remain key to the success of the cooperation are uncompromising excellence in development and the scalability of our autonomous driving platform,” said Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG. “With FCA as our new partner, we reinforce our path to successfully create the most relevant state-of-the-art, cross-OEM Level 3-5 solution on a global scale.”
“The future of transportation relies on auto and tech industry leaders working together to develop a scalable architecture that automakers around the globe can adopt and customize,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. “We’re thrilled to welcome FCA’s contribution, bringing us a step closer to delivering the world’s safest autonomous vehicles.”
“We welcome FCA’s contributions and use of the cooperation’s platform, which has made substantial progress over the last year and is rapidly entering the testing and execution phase,” stated Professor Amnon Shashua, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye, an Intel Company. “The combination of vision-intense perception and mapping, differentiated sensor fusion, and driving policy solutions offers the highest levels of safety and versatility, in a cost-efficient package that will scale across all geographies and road settings.”
BMW Group, Intel, Mobileye and FCA, together with the recently announced development partners and system integrators, invite and welcome additional automakers and technology suppliers to join them in adopting this autonomous driving platform in an effort to create an industry-wide solution.
