What's the news?
BMW Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) have announced that they are teaming up - along with tech firms Intel and Mobileye - to work on a 'world-leading, state-of-the-art autonomous driving platform for global deployment'.
In truth, BMW, Intel and Mobileye joined forces in July 2016 and said they would be making self-driving vehicles a reality, bringing highly automated driving (Level 3) and fully automated driving into production by 2021.
FCA coming on board simply adds further expertise, as the giant Italian-American conglomerate will be bringing its engineering and technical resources to the table, as well as its increased sales volumes, geographical reach and long-time experience in North America.
FCA's bombastic CEO, Sergio Marchionne, said of the tie-up with BMW and the others: "In order to advance autonomous driving technology, it is vital to form partnerships among automakers, technology providers and suppliers. Joining this cooperation will enable FCA to directly benefit from the synergies and economies of scale that are possible when companies come together with a common vision and objective."
His counterpart at BMW AG, chairman Harald Krüger, added: "The two factors that remain key to the success of the cooperation are uncompromising excellence in development, and the scalability of our autonomous driving platform. With FCA as our new partner, we reinforce our path to successfully create the most relevant state-of-the-art, cross-OEM Level 3-5 [autonomous driving] solutions on a global scale."
Anything else?
The tech companies were happy with FCA's inclusion, too. Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, said: "The future of transportation relies on auto and tech industry leaders working together to develop a scalable architecture that automakers around the globe can adopt and customise. We're thrilled to welcome FCA's contribution, bringing us a step closer to delivering the world's safest autonomous vehicles."
And Professor Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye (an Intel company), also said: "We welcome FCA's contributions and use of the cooperation's platform, which has made substantial progress over the last year and is rapidly entering the testing and execution phase. The combination of vision-intense perception and mapping, differentiated sensor fusion, and driving policy solutions offers the highest levels of safety and versatility, in a cost-efficient package that will scale across all geographies and road settings."
BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye have already said 40 autonomous driving test vehicles will hit the roads by the end of this year, so the project is already well under way.