Autonomous Driving Cooperation

You might think that anything to do with autonomy would be an endeavor best done on one’s own, but the better way to make progress is by collaborating.

That’s carmaker BMW’s thinking in hooking up with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, the originators of the popular WeChat app, to develop self-driving vehicles. 1000 BMW engineers are already in China working on autonomous driving projects, and together the two companies aim to open a massive data center near Beijing.

One of the great challenges the project must overcome is China’s notoriously chaotic traffic. But BMW’s global head of autonomous driver, Alejandro Vukotich, says that there will be dividends if researchers manage to crack that nut.

“If we can solve that problem for China, we’ll have solved it for other markets as well,” explains Vukotich.