As I stood in the blazing hot sun of San Jose, California earlier this month at an Autonomous Driving workshop put on by Intel at their new Innovation Center, I was energized by the excitement and conversation buzzing in the crowd of 125 influencers from around the globe. Delphi was a key player in the event as our automated car demonstrated our autonomous capabilities in a driving demo around Intel’s campus. Another key player was BMW, whose beautiful cars and technologies were on display in Intel’s new garage – showing off their truly impressive connected car systems.
These partnerships are more important today than ever, given the announcement that BMW, Mobileye and Intel named Delphi as a systems integrator and development partner for their automated driving platform. This announcement speaks to Delphi’s experience and expertise putting complex technologies together to work under the harshest conditions, which is what it means to make something automotive grade.
In July 2016, the BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye announced that they would join forces to deliver a highly and fully automated driving system for serial production by 2021. Delphi will help the partners deliver a scalable architecture that can be adopted by other carmakers and mobility providers in pursuing state-of-the-art designs and to create brand differentiation.
We bring our technical depth and experience in automated driving and smart vehicle architecture to help the cooperation partners develop and deploy at scale. This is an amazing opportunity for Delphi to collaborate with industry leaders to make automated driving a reality that will ultimately help deliver goods and people at lower cost, reduce and possibly eliminate vehicle crashes and congestion.
This agreement won’t slow down our previously announced automated driving solution called the Centralized Sensing, Localization and Planning Platform (CSLP), which Delphi, Mobileye and Intel are developing -- a turnkey AD solution based on the Ottomatika software, our computing platform, and our sensors. In fact, one of the most exciting aspects of today’s announcement is the potential to align our work on the CSLP Platform with the work BMW, Intel, and Mobileye are doing as part of their cooperation.
This will be a very complementary relationship for BMW, Intel, Mobileye and Delphi, where a select group of the industry’s powerhouses in automated driving can solve the toughest and most expensive areas of automated driving.
No one can do this alone. Partnerships and other collaborative arrangements are fundamental to the production and marketization of automated driving technology.