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BMW To Compete With Google To Build Software For Self-Driving Cars (reuters.com)
SmartAboutThings writes: Google is about to get some serious competition in the self-driving car race from none other than BMW, one of the most prominent names in the car industry. Speaking to Reuters, BMW's Head of Research and Development, Klaus Frohlich, said the following while present at the Geneva Motor Show: "For me it is a core competence to have the most intelligent car. Our task is to preserve our business model without surrendering it to an internet player. Otherwise we will end up as the Foxconn for a company like Apple, delivering only the metal bodies for them." BMW believes its competitors in the future will include internet taxi service Uber and sales website TrueCar. As the company is approaching its 100th birthday, the company is now on a quest to build the "ultimate driving machine." The company is preparing for a world in which its customers will be mere passengers, and the cars will do the driving themselves.
I say this as somebody who owns and loves BMWs... they suck ass at software. They can't even get things like their console information / entertainment system to be reasonably bug-free, so how the hell do they think they can actually do difficult and important stuff?
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The German companies do it a bit different than American companies, they pool resources for the common R&D good. It's why they had stuff like CAN bus while Ford and GM were all developing their own unique busses.
BMW, VW and Benz all have a lot of research into this. I sat in on a grad seminar given by VW engineers back in 2010 on lane change obstacle avoidance. They certainly have the IP already, even if they aren't announcing it state side. They even have ISO standards for how to test obstacle avoidance: ISO 3888-2:2011 defines the dimensions of the test track for a closed-loop, severe lane-change manoeuvre test for subjectively determining the obstacle avoidance performance of a vehicle, one specific part of vehicle dynamics and road-holding ability. It is applicable to passenger cars as defined in ISO 3833 and light commercial vehicles up to a gross vehicle mass of 3,5 t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I had a BMW and Benz rental in 2012 that had the auto stop feature that is just now starting to show up in American cars. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
If there is any group of car companies that is going to give you autonomous driving with manual over ride it's going to be the German ones. German drivers also have a different mentality towards driving. Driving falls into two categories, either you have to do it and you can automate it or you want to do it and you don't want to automate it. I would say of my driving there's a good 80/20 split. 80% of the time I'd like the car to just get me somewhere but 20% of the time I do want an autobahn experience.
Just because you don't think BMW hasn't done any research into self driving cars doesn't mean they haven't. It is an incredibly long process and Germans have had an ISO standard for testing it since 2011 as well. The TÜV doesn't mess around when it comes to safety or testing and I trust anything they verify much more than the DOT.