New BMW Development Center for Autonomous Driving Now Open

Launching the next BMW iNEXT vehicle in 2021 plus developing self-driving, electric and fully connected range of highly-automated models for all BMW Group brands is not a simple task. To achieve this goal, BMW opened a new home to host all development expertise in vehicle connectivity and automated driving. The new BMW development center is located at Unterschleissheim near Munich.

There are a lot of people needed for the work to be done in the development center. Once fully functioning, more than 2,000 employees are needed for fully-automated driving development, from software development to road testing. “The road to fully-automated driving is an opportunity for Germany’s automobile manufacturing base. The decision to develop and road-test these vehicles in the Munich area illustrates how the BMW Group and the whole region can benefit from this shift in the automotive industry,” explains Klaus Fröhlich, member of the Board of Management, responsible for Development at the BMW Group.

Hiring for specific expertise will begin in mid-2017. “In order to succeed, we are establishing new forms of collaboration under “project i 2.0”, with small teams of specialists for rapid response and collaboration across the company, as well as a high level of individual decision-making authority,” explains Fröhlich.

“The future development site for autonomous driving will enable us to launch the BMW iNEXT, the first self-driving BMW, onto the market in 2021,” according to Fröhlich. The BMW Group aims to start testing highly-automated vehicles in the urban environment, in Munich, as early as 2017.

The BMW Group currently has around 600 people in development of highly-automated driving. The majority are software developers and they are hiring more. “We still do our own programming here and are responsible for implementing our own ideas,” explains André Müller, a software developer in the autonomous driving team. “We use the latest technologies, such as ROS (Robot Operating System), and are able to see the results quickly and directly in the vehicle. It is extremely exciting to be working on such an important area for the future.”