Key milestone reached on BMW’s autonomous driving roadmap

The launch of the new BMW Group High Performance D3 platform represents a key milestone on its roadmap to highly and fully automated driving.

D3 stands for Data-Driven Development, helping secure the safety and reliability of the Level 3 system to be offered in the electric BMW iNext SUV in late 2021.

The BMW Group has been applying the D3 approach for a couple of years. The basic principle is rooted in the assumption that the only way of mapping – and thereby ultimately handling – the complexity and variety of traffic situations encountered on every continent is to gather vast quantities of data.

This means the algorithms and overall operation of autonomous driving have to be validated using a broad data pool.

The first step in the process is to collect about 5 million kilometres of real-life driving data from test fleet vehicles. From this data, two million kilometres of the most relevant driving scenarios and environmental factors are then extracted.

The relevance of the data collected is continuously improving thanks to the way in which qualitative data is selected using data qualification/filtering. The qualified two million kilometres of data is constantly expanded by a further 240 million kilometres of simulation-generated data, mainly based on the relevant driving scenarios.

The BMW Group is convinced that autonomous driving will have a decisive impact on personal and sustainable mobility in the future.

Today’s driver assistance systems form an important building block on the road to highly automated driving. As well as the safety aspects, efforts are also focused on bringing about a significant gain in comfort and a further improvement in efficiency.

In 2021 the production version of the BMW Vision iNext will become the first model from the BMW Group to offer a Level 3 system as an option. This system will enable drivers to delegate the task of driving to the car for longer periods of time when driving on the motorway at speeds up to 130 km/h.

A fleet of test vehicles will begin work in late 2021 with the aim of testing Level 4 functionality (zero driver intervention) in large-scale trials in defined urban environments.