We all know that driverless cars are racing toward us, and even at this stage we know it’s a matter of when not if they arrive, but getting us to the point where we can safely take our hands off the wheel isn’t a simple task. To do that, we need cars that can think for themselves, not to mention overcoming various liability and regulatory issues. German car giant BMW has a plan though, and says it can deliver fully autonomous, sleep-in-the-driving-seat, take-your-eyes-off-the-road, cars by 2021.

“Since 100 years ago we are driving by ourselves, but with the technology changes, with the supercomputers, with the internet of things, with 100% connectivity everything has changed. Disruptively,” says Elmar Frickenstein, senior vice president of fully automated driving and driver assistance at the BMW Group. “The autonomous driving will come. With these supercomputers we are able to make it happen to be in 2021 for fully-automated driving.”

BMW has been in the automotive industry for a century and it recognises that it’s not always easy to bring disruption to such a well-oiled machine.

For this reason, BMW is partnering with a number of innovative startups and companies from outside the automotive industry like Intel and Nokia, whose products can bring BMW’s established brand into the 21st century. BMW calls its startup programme Startup Garage, but will associations with companies new and old be enough to eject drivers from BMW’s cars?

How driverless cars get from A to B

“We have to do a lot of different things. We have to do the electronics, we have to do new architecture in a [driverless] car. We have to create a backend solution. We have to create a full blown sensor set up and sensor fusion. We have to create the motion control and finally we have backend security as well as vehicle security to think about,” says Frickenstein.

“We need artificial intelligence and in the middle we need to have an environmental model, which includes a supercomputer that checks everything from the street.”

As well as the fundamental technology, there is also a wealth of knowledge that cars need to be able to drive without human interference. Humans have the advantage of years of road experience, as well as intuitively knowing the road position of the car and the by-product of the speed of the car (neither too fast nor too slow is desirable).

Humans also have information about speed limits, pedestrians, accidents, and can make decisions that while not strictly legal, are in the best interests of other road users. This is the kind of information that we need to impart to driverless cars.

“With all this knowledge you are able to drive a car from A to B, without that you cannot do that, so this is our task and therefore we need the supercomputers, we need the software, we need the IT and the 100% connectivity. We have to team up our BMW team with partners. We start partnering together with cross-industry collaboration. It is not possible to do these jobs only in the automotive industry,” explains Frickenstein.

Spirit of collaboration

Realising its limitations and collaborating with experts in other fields appears to be BMW’s roadmap to 2021 and driverless technology. Need to know about AI? Ask Intel. Interested in mobile technology? Check with Nokia.

If we make fully-autonomous driving cars, we create less accidents, less traffic, less parking and searching algorithms and less CO 2

It’s this kind of collaborative spirit that led to BMW’s participation in the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA). The group includes Audi, BMW and Daimler from the automotive side and Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Vodafone and Qualcomm from the telecoms industry, and has been set up to develop 5G technology for future connected and autonomous vehicles.

As well as collaborations between companies, BMW has also spoken of the need for nations to work together in order to make autonomous driving a reality. “We need a lot of test fields to do tests on the street,” says Frickenstein. “We need it in Germany, we need it in the US, we need it in Israel as well as in China. We need a lot of help from the legal department, certification and legal requirements to do our jobs.”

The spirit of collaboration autonomous driving necessitates has obvious benefits for both parties, in that new business streams are created for both; but it will also benefit communities rather than just individual drivers. “If we are making ride sharing, for example, and we make fully-autonomous driving cars, we create less accidents, less traffic, less parking and searching algorithms and less CO 2 , so there is a big benefit for the customer and a big benefit also for the community,” says Frickenstein.

Startup Garage

Frickenstein explains that we’ve already achieved semi-automated driving, but nobody has been able to push beyond that point at this stage. “No driver assistance, no electronics in, this is level 0. With level 2 it’s partly automated driving. We are talking about temporary hands off, temporary eyes off. Nobody in the world has created more than level 2, so the whole automotive industry is in level 2 and in the next years, we are on the way to go to level 3,” says Frickenstein.

To get to level 3, BMW will need new technologies that solve the problems driverless cars raise. In order to get these new technologies, BMW has created the Startup Garage, which takes innovative technologies, products or services, made by startup companies, and uses them to significantly advance and disrupt the automotive industry. Startups that are selected to work in the garage undergo a special programme lasting several months. At the core of this programme is the development of a functional prototype that pushes BMW’s cars to go further, faster and without human interference.

It goes without saying that letting 3,000-pound dea th machines steer themselves without humans at the controls will take an awful lot of work. BMW will need to ensure that regulation is changed to let that happen, but there are also a lot of technological challenges to overcome as well.

The car giant has recognised that it needs unfamiliar technologies to achieve fully-automated driving by 2021, and the best way to innovate is to work with innovative partners. We can’t understate the size of the task BMW has given itself: four years to transform the automotive industry; but it has put partnerships in place to achieve that target.