BMW creates some of the most high-tech cars we have yet seen. The German giant builds 2.5 million vehicles every year and sells them all over the world.
But technology is not just limited to the cars it builds, its business model is built on Big Data which drives everything it does across design, engineering, production, sales and customer support.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), data-driven predictive analytics and other cutting edge technologies BMW is able to build the cars of today while at the same time envisaging and bringing to reality the cars of tomorrow.
BMW is clearly confident in its belief that cars of the near future will pilot themselves, rather than relying on human drivers. All the big auto manufacturers are staking their claim in a driverless future, but BMW has done so with more confidence than most. It has stated that its aim is for its vehicles to achieve full “level 5” autonomy by 2021.
Level 5 autonomy tops the scale defined by the US Department of Transport as it made preliminary investigations into how legislation for autonomous vehicles would work. It indicates that the car will be capable of driving with no human input or supervision and operate at least as effective as a human driver in any conditions and on any road.
More details of how this would be achieved began to emerge earlier this year when BMW announced a partnership with Intel, which itself had recently acquired Mobileye, a leader in Computer vision technology. Computer vision is based on the idea of teaching machines to “see” in the same way humans do, using cameras instead of biological eyes and to interpret the information in a similar way to our brains. It is an advanced form of image recognition – which can be seen in action in Google Image Search as well as many other machine learning applications, where machines have been taught to sort and classify images, becoming more adept as they are exposed to more and more data.
Of course, rather than sorting harmless images of cats and dogs on the internet, the computer vision used in autonomous driving will have to be capable of reading all of the input data from the cars’ cameras and sensors and analyzing it in real-time - quickly enough to take emergency action at 100 kph.
Although full autonomy is probably still a few years away, the cars that BMW is road testing at the moment are described as “highly automated”. A fleet of 40 BMW series 7, equipped with Mobileye technology, are expected to be on the road by late summer. Although the vehicles won’t pilot themselves or operate without a driver, the autonomy level 3 and 4 vehicles can carry out most driving procedures unassisted, although a human must be ready to take full control at any time – to remain on the right side of the law, if nothing else.
One group of people for whom the concept of not having to drive themselves around is nothing new is Rolls Royce owners. Unsurprisingly, this brand (also owned by BMW) styles its self-driving software as a virtual chauffeur. At the controls of the concept model 103EX is Eleanor, named after the actress and model believed to have been the inspiration for the cars’ famous Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornaments.
The body is made from one seamless, molded piece of metal, in the form of sculpture and the car generates a personal red carpet using LEDs for when its occupant steps out.
Sure, this might not be the sort of car most of us will own in 10 years, but the design of the 103EX gives us some clues about how the super-rich will be served by AI and autonomy.
