BMW Intel and Mobileye to Team up with Delphi as Development Partner for Autonomous Driving Platform

In July 2016 the BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye had earlier decided to collaborate on a state-of-the art autonomous driving platform and to bring fully automated vehicles into series production by 2021. The three partners have now announced that Delphi will be the development partner and system integrator for their platform. The four companies will use a cooperation model to deliver and scale the solutions they develop to the broader OEM automotive industry and possibly other industries in the future.

Delphi has previously worked with the BMW Group and had provided the automotive manufacturer with a prototype computer platform. Delphi is also currently working with Mobileye and Intel on several projects related to perception, sensor fusion, and high performance automated driving computing.

From the time they started working together in July 2016, BMW, Mobileye and Intel have come up with a scalable architecture that can be modified by other automotive developers to create their very own designs and thus differentiate their brands. According to Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich, the three Collaboration partners are on course to deliver 40 pilot cars in the second half of 2017. He felt that adding Delphi as an integration partner would help to expedite the introduction of autonomous cars on the streets from multiple manufacturers and would offer differentiation to customers.

The role of system integrators like Delphi is critical for the go to market strategy of the joint solution to reach multiple automotive OEMs quickly. Delphi will be tasked with integration of the solution developed by the three partners into OEM vehicle architectures. As part of the partnership, Delphi might also need to make hardware components like sensors and help the partners customize the autonomous driving platform and provide different applications to differentiate their brand from that of others.

This agreement between Delphi and the three Cooperation Partners is non-exclusive. The Cooperation Partners are currently recruiting more integration and development partners to support future OEM customer needs.

Commenting on the tie-up, Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for Development said, “From the very beginning we designed our cooperation on a non-exclusive platform for this technology of the future. With the onboarding of Delphi we significantly strengthen our development of the automated driving and do a future step in spreading this technology across the industry.

Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua said that with Delphi’s expertise in the field and its long history of integrating complex systems, it was an excellent choice when it comes to development partners.

Kevin Clark, President and CEO of Delphi said that the new partnership will provide Delphi with a great opportunity to use its technical depth and experience in automated driving and electrical architecture to help the cooperation develop and deploy at scale. The company already has a close working relationship with all three partners that will serve as a solid foundation for success.