BMW, Mobileye Partner to Collect and Share Self-Driving Car Data

(Bloomberg) -- BMW AG will use chips and cameras made by Mobileye NV to collect mapping data for autonomous driving in its vehicles starting in 2018, the two companies said in a statement.

The German carmaker will also allow data to be merged with information collected from competitors’ fleets to speed the development of high-definition maps that are critical to enable autonomous driving. The announcement comes a week after Mobileye said it signed a similar accord with Volkswagen AG to collect and share mapping data for self-driving cars.

Mobileye has been lobbying its customers -- traditional car manufacturers -- to both install the mapping technology and allow it to merge that data into one collaborative mapping effort. Chairman Amnon Shashua has called technology that gathers crowd-sourced real-time mapping data from automakers’ fleets the “missing piece” in the race to achieve fully autonomous driving.

The data Mobileye collects using its Road Experience Management, or REM technology, will be provided to HERE, the consortium forged by BMW, Daimler AG and VW-owned Audi, to develop a real-time mapping service to enable autonomous driving.

BMW already has a relationship with Jerusalem-based Mobileye, announcing in July a partnership with the company and Intel Corp. to put a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021.

Mobileye reports earnings Wednesday before the market opens in New York. The company’s shares rose as much as 3.4 percent after Tuesday’s announcement with BMW.