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BMW Aims to Build In-House Expertise for an Autonomous Future
BMW AG envisions a time where half its researchers are software engineers and most of its customers ride around in self-driving cars.
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BMW AG envisions a time where half its researchers are software engineers and most of its customers ride around in self-driving cars.
Klaus Froehlich, BMW’s board member in charge of r&d, tells Reuters the company’s mission is to offer the market’s “most intelligent car.” Doing so, he says, will mean building in-house software capacity to avoid becoming nothing more than a “metal bodies” supplier to such companies as Apple or Google.
Froehlich tells Reuters his objective is to leverage the ratio of software engineers BMW currently uses from among the 30,000 employees, contractors and supplier engineering staffs from 20% today to 50% in five years.
Achieving that ambitious goal will mean finding the manpower equivalent of 15,000-20,000 engineers—more than BMW could hope to assemble itself in such a short time, Froehlich says.
Froehlich believes the key will be to quickly create a network of new suppliers, including many from outside the traditional auto industry. He tells Reuters one urgent need at BMW is to build up its expertise in cloud computing.
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