Earlier this year, while celebrating its centennial, BMW told us it plans to offer a self-driving car by 2021 called the iNext. A battery-electric luxury sedan with autonomous capability, developed in partnership with suppliers Intel and Mobileye, the iNext represents an ambitious reach for a company that has?thus far?not been regarded as a leader in either electric cars or self-driving technology. Now we’ve toured the facilities where this work is underway to see just how big an effort will be required to change that reality.
“Fully autonomous driving is like a mission to Mars,” Klaus Fröhlich, BMW board member for research and development, told us at a press briefing in Munich. “We’re calling it Project i2.0.” Sales and marketing chief Ian Robertson compared it to an “Apollo mission” and cautioned that the company is “in the very, very early stages of this digitalization. We are shifting our horizons dramatically. We have been a classic engineering company, but we are going to become a tech company.” Suggesting how much research will be devoted to the program, Fröhlich noted that BMW’s entire R&D program today encompasses 60 petabytes (one petabyte is one million gigabytes) of data; the new project will require 600 petabytes, or a tenfold increase. In five years.
A lot of that will be devoted to the development of the artificial intelligence (AI) to make a self-driving car possible in that timefram...