If you read announcements from automakers with any regularity, you’ll detect a trend: Executives there saying glowing things about self-driving technology. Ford CEO Jim Farley was among the most recent to do so, praising Waymo’s forays into this realm and being more critical of Tesla’s efforts. But what if there was an automaker who dared to argue that drivers just want to drive?
In an article for Autoblog, Paul Horrell examined BMW’s seemingly contrarian strategy. He observed that while BMW once touted plans to have its cars drive themselves in a few years’ time, they seem to have stepped back from that rhetoric, instead emphasizing their use of driver assistance systems. BMW’s Alexander Karajlovic told Autoblog that “[w]e are looking for safety, not planning flashy features.” And in the automaker’s update on its electric Neue Klasse iX3 last month, BMW stressed its safety features as opposed to letting the car drive itself. The phrase “automated driving” did come up there, but it’s notable it did so in the context of technology that “supports the driver” as opposed to replacing them.
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The M5 Touring is finally available in the States. We spent a week with the long-roof to see what the hype was all about.The approach BMW seems to be taking here isn’t necessarily viable for every automaker. If you’re already touting that driving one of your vehicles is a luxury experience, it’s that much easier to embrace self driving as a selling point. But other automakers have also found their path to fully-automated driving to be more complex than planned, as the recent case of a Tesla owner who successfully got Tesla to reimburse him for what he’d paid for Full Self-Driving shows.
For now, BMW’s drift away from ambitious self-driving features is the exception, rather than the norm. In the last year, automakers like Hyundai and Toyota partnered with Waymo. Whose bets will end up paying off is a question that has big implications for the future of driving and the industry as a whole.
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