cars news 10: BMW to Push Electric, Autonomous Vehicles

BMW will roll out a string of plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles equipped with increasingly self-driving capacity during the next decade, a top executive said.

Klaus Fröhlich, BMW’s board of management head of development, said the automaker is working on system integration between powertrain, chassis, and braking controls, along with fully autonomous driving capability. BMW has partnered with Intel and Mobileye for computing power.

Unlike other automakers that farm out EV development to suppliers, BMW is engineering its next-generation inverter, motor, and battery in-house, said Stefan Juraschek, vice president of R&D for electric powertrains. The next-generation goal is to improve the power-to-weight ratio of the e-machine, power electronics, and gearbox systems while reducing the cost by 30 percent, he said.

These engineering leaps will appear in the iNext electric vehicle that arrives in 2021. BMW recently showed a conceptual mockup, called Vision Next, at its 100^th anniversary celebration. Here’s a look at the cutting-edge products BMW plans to introduce over the next 10 years.

BMW’s high-tech rollout

2017 BMW 5 series PHEV
2017 Mini Countryman PHEV
2018 i8 Roadster; short-term hands-off highway autonomy
2019 Mini EV
2020 X3 EV; advanced autonomous function
2021 iNext EV; hands/eyes-off highway or major artery autonomy
2022: Active lane changing autonomy
2025: Fuel Cell vehicle
2026: Solid state electrolyte battery

BMW will stick with lithium-ion batteries for the next eight years or so, but the electrolyte may change to ceramic or polymer when the automaker builds its first solid-state battery, Juraschek said.

Globally, BMW has reached 100,000 total plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles sold to date. But BMW hopes to start selling 100,000 units a year starting in 2017, when it will offer a total of six plug-in hybrids and one battery-electric vehicle, said Ian Robertson, BMW Group sales and marketing chief.

Between the BMW, Mini, and i brands, the automaker hopes these electric powertrains will account for 20 percent of the brand’s sales by 2025, Frölich said.

But getting mass-market levels of battery-electric vehicle sales may be easier than the mountain of development work for fully autonomous vehicles.

Fröhlich is cognizant of the immensity of the task at hand. To date, BMW’s autonomous-vehicles research has amassed 60 petabytes (or 60 million gigabytes) of data. He believes the research effort to create a fully autonomous vehicle will require 10 times that amount of research.

To ensure autonomous-vehicle early adopters do not get stuck with outdated technology, BMW will offer over-the-air software updates (similar to Tesla) starting in 2018.

“These will be upgrades, not patches because we didn’t do our development very well,” Fröhlich said. “This is not for fixing bugs.”

Rene Grosspietsch, BMW’s head of autonomous driving cooperation and ecosystems, said that the big hurdle for BMW’s team is teaching an autonomous vehicle to have “contextual understanding.”

BMW is developing a multi-layer system of lidar, radar, cameras, ultrasound, and high-definition mapping to create redundancies in scanning the road ahead, behind, and to the sides.

“You have to estimate the movements of other objects, to predict the intentions of traffic and pedestrians,” Grosspietsch said.

But that’s not all that BMW is chasing. The automaker will be active in car-sharing, digital parking-lot reservation services, and on-demand EV charging.

To achieve this wish list, BMW is going to “recruit like hell” to add additional brainpower for its quest, Fröhlich said.

“This is like a mission to Mars,” Fröhlich said. “We want to be the leader in the field. We want to act like a startup, but deliver like a grownup.”