Fiat Chrysler wants to work with you in the future BMW and the US chip specialist Intel Assistance Systems for self-driving cars develop. The Italian-American concern with brands such as Fiat, Chrysler, Jeep and Alfa Romeo joins for it as the first automaker of the alliance founded last year, as the companies said. A letter of intent had been signed. The Alliance also includes the Israeli camera company Mobileye.
Autonomous driving cars, which cover their distances almost without the driver’s intervention, are considered one of the major future topics in the auto industry. Efforts of IT giants Google and Apple, to bring even robot cars on the road or focusing on its role as a supplier of robotic car technology had alarmed traditional auto companies, not least because of the software know-how and financial strength of American IT giants. The current market value of Apple is more than 711 billion euros – for comparison: BMW is just under 53 billion, Fiat Chrysler at less than 17 billion.
“In order to advance the technology for autonomous driving, partnerships among automakers, technology providers and suppliers are essential,” said Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne. Fiat Chrysler will bring technical competence into the partnership – this company’s engineers are to work together – in Germany and at the locations of other companies. BMW is creating its own campus near Munich where, after completion, more than 2,000 engineers will work on automated driving.
Other automakers should be able to buy the technology
By 2021, the first self-driving vehicles to go into production, BMW announced last year, the iNext – an electric car that can move autonomously. Until then, the technology will be developed on board for autonomous cars and later offered to other manufacturers for sale. A test fleet of robotic cars is already in Germany and the US on the road, it should be 40 vehicles by the end of the year, it says at BMW.
In the alliance, every company wants to bring its own strengths – Mobileye is considered a pioneer of camera-based detection of driving situations on the road, Intel wants to provide the computing power that is needed in self-driving cars of the future. Intel is currently in the final stages of the billionaire acquisition of Mobileye. The cooperation of the companies had recently also joined the suppliers Continental and Delphi. As so-called system integrators, they should ensure that camera systems, sensors and complex control units in the cars communicate smoothly with each other and with the driver.
With partnerships, groups from the auto industry want to distribute the necessary billions of investments for technical developments on several shoulders. The Stuttgart-based BMW rival Daimler announced in the spring that it would launch fully autonomous cars for city traffic with its supplier Bosch by the beginning of the next decade. In order for the expenses to pay off in research and development, it is important for the partners that the shared technology is ultimately used in as many cars as possible.