BMW Hatches Project 'i Next' on Self Driven Electric Car


BENGALURU: From carts to automobile and now innovations and technological convergence makes a further move towards bringing-in zero-emission, self driving cars into existence. Contributing 25 percent of the total manufacturing GDP across globe, a century old Bavarian car maker’s R&D team makes a move to revamp their “i” sub-brand of carbon-fiber based electric vehicles to ‘self-driving’, taking luxury to a new level.

‘BMW i’ is an electric car designed to emit zero carbon dioxide, in-line with the principle of maximum conservation of resources and sustainability. This car has two models released ‘BMW i3’ and ‘BMW i8’; i3 is an urban electric car and i8 is an electric sports car. The sales of i3 recorded in 2015 showed 25,000 sales over Tesla’s sales which grossed more than 370,000 for its ‘Model 3’ cars. To surpass the market rivals, BMW is increasing the sales of its i3 model by 50 percent.

Reports from Reuters emphasize that Tesla’s Model 3 will be due till 2017 and other rivals in the automobile market are planning to release their electric car models by 2019. The self driving empowered electric BMW i3 model will be ready by 2021, having baptized as Project ‘i Next’. With software engineers contributing only 20 percent of the total 30,000 employees that work on R&D for BMW, Reuters say that in the coming five years, BMW will raise the proportion of software engineers to 50 percent. This boost in proportion is due to the requirement of machine learning and artificial intelligence experts for developing the best autonomous driving program.  The autonomous driving integrates functions of existing computer-driven assistance systems like cruise control, emergency braking, lane-keeping support and automatic parking.

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