BMW teams up with Intel to have autonomous cars on road by 2021

PanARMENIAN.Net - BMW has already said it wants to get autonomous cars on the road by 2021, but the automaker doesn't have all the technological know-how to make that a reality. To get there, BMW announced Friday, July 1 a partnership with Intel and computer vision / sensing company Mobileye to build a platform that'll help the company meet its goals, Engadget reports.

But what the three companies are working on won't just benefit BWM -- it sounds like the idea is to make an open industry platform that other car makers can use in an effort to make autonomous vehicles more widely available, the technology news website says.

All three companies have agreed to "deliverables and milestones" to reach that 2021 goal, but they aren't talking much about what those are just yet. In the short term, the partners will show off an autonomous test drive featuring a "highly automated driving" prototype. What exactly that means remains unclear, but it seems like we should see things come out of those partnership before too long -- by 2017, BWM, Intel and Mobileye want to have full fleets of vehicles performing "extended" autonomous test drives.