66 » OpenRoad Driver
BMW’s Vision of
Automated Driving
Words and photos by Andrew Ling
»
Every January the world’s media swarm Las Vegas, Nevada for
the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Now in its 50 th year, CES
is a global consumer electronics and technology tradeshow that
showcases the hottest tech gadgets of tomorrow.
With technology increasingly prevalent in cars today, BMW invited
us for an exclusive sneak peek of its advances in automated driving,
intelligent connectivity, and control and display systems. BMW’s
engineers were still wary of calling our demonstrator an autonomous
vehicle, but rather a preview of the Level 3 autonomous car that
should reach production status by 2021.
Key to our preview was the all-new BMW 5 Series sedan equipped
with Personal CoPilot. Already packed with loads of driver aid
technology in its current production form, the prototype 5 Series
was remarkably unchanged despite its self-driving capabilities.
However, the prototype relied on a special laptop in the trunk which
could cross-check the vehicle’s position against a highly detailed
roadmap, resulting in very accurate lane-keeping.
Rather than just showcase an autonomous vehicle like other
manufacturers at CES, it was uniquely eye-opening to witness
BMW’s overall vision of how a Personal CoPilot car could be
integrated into our future lives. Working through the car’s link-
up with their Open Mobility Cloud and the BMW Connected
personal mobility companion app, the systems work in tandem
to consider the driver’s appointments of the day and contacts to
automatically calculate an optimal drive route with segments that
can be safely conducted in autonomous mode.
No longer needing to operate the controls when behind the wheel,
drivers can use this freed-up time to relax or plan the rest of their
day. To showcase this, BMW equipped our prototype 5 Series with a
special tablet. Once the car was in Passenger mode, we were allowed
to stream movies via Amazon Prime Video and order needed items
online through Prime Now. The car even automatically dimmed
the interior lights and closed the rear sunshades when a movie was
selected. Additionally, the car’s iDrive system was able to pull up
local points of interest and read out TripAdvisor-style information
related to these places.
BMW’s CES 2017 preview provided us with a glimpse of how we
could travel around in the near future, what we can expect of a car’s
interior, and how we might want to experience a journey. From what
we saw in Las Vegas, the future is very friendly indeed.