‘BMW teams up with tech firms for driverless cars’

BMW is set to announce an alliance to develop self-driving cars with collision detection specialist Mobileye and computer chip maker Intel, a source familiar with the matter said, as the race to put driverless cars on the road heats up.

The tie-up is likely to focus on technology being developed by Mobileye to give computer-driven vehicles better reflexes without driver input, ushering in an era of self-driving cars early in the next decade, analysts said.

The three companies said they would hold a joint news conference on Friday, without giving details. It will be attended by BMW Chief Executive Harald Krueger, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Mobileye Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Amnon Shashua, they said.

Automakers and technology firms are striking new alliances to commercialize self-driving cars after being caught off guard by big investments by Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Tesla and Apple into the field.

This week German carmakers, auto-suppliers and map makers HERE and TomTom agreed a standard that would govern how road and vehicle performance data is transmitted from Internet-connected cars to cloud-based online services, enabling more automated traffic management and car management services.

Earlier in June, BMW, the world's largest luxury carmaker by sales, said it would launch a new flagship model with autonomous driving capability in 2021.

"We anticipate that Intel has been tapped to provide the (central processor unit) needed at the vehicle level, the computer that coordinates the myriad components of the car in combination with Mobileye's ... software," Evercore financial analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said in note to clients.

Mobileye is the top supplier of camera-based sensor systems used in driver assistance systems in the latest generation of vehicles. These systems are used for changing lanes and to detect other cars or pedestrians but are expected to evolve to include mapping and automated decision-making features.

Autonomous driving alliance Terms of the three-way deal are not yet known, nor is it clear how the pact between Intel and Mobileye might affect the Israeli firm's long-standing partnership with French-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics, which manufactures Mobileye sensor systems.

In May, Mobileye and STMicro said they had agreed to extend a 12-year-old partnership to develop a fifth-generation Mobileye system, which they said would provide fully autonomous driving features for cars due to hit the road around 2020.