Self-driving cars are the business of the future – but until then, a lot of money flows into research and development. The costs are so high, that BMW is always looking for new partners. In China, Internet giant.
The iNext is the result of cooperation between BMW and Daimler and is expected to operate in a phased manner without a driver
Autonomous is a challenge to Drive on the crowded roads in China’s cities. This is why BMW gets for now with the help of the Chinese games Online specialists Tencent on Board. Together, they build a data center that is to be built in the Eastern Chinese city of Tianjin. “BMW is able to develop solutions for Autonomous Driving, which better match the specific driving conditions in China,” said the China head of BMW, Jochen Goller.
With Tencent, which also operates the world’s popular mobile platform WeChat have BMW a “suitable Partner”. “China is particularly suitable for the development of Autonomous driving,” said Goller. The Chinese government will give a clear course. It was “incredible” how much money will be invested – more than in Silicon Valley in the United States. “Other countries talk about 5G, China is building it,” said Goller about the super-fast new mobile radio standard.
The Chinese Online-games specialist, Tencent knows in the processing of large amounts of data
The global BMW-in-chief for Autonomous Driving, Alejandro Vukotich, acknowledged that Autonomous Driving is once occurred as an “unsolvable Problem”. But: “If we solve the Problem in China, we have solved it for other markets.”
2021 BMW wants to introduce self-driving cars
Tencent has a large computing capacity in the Cloud and a lot of experience with processing large amounts of data, which are for Autonomous Driving is necessary because the information about the traffic and the roads in real time to be processed and analyzed. BMW wants to semi-automatically driving cars in China in 2021 on the market. A first data center for Autonomous Driving had opened the car maker this year in Munich.
The new Trends in the car industry lead to new collaborations. On the German home market, BMW works together with the direct competitor to Daimler in the case of self-driving cars and mobility services.
rb/nob (dpa, rtr)