Kathy Winter, vice president and general manager of the Automated Driving Division at Intel Corporation, wrote in the Intel Automotive Blog that her broken ankle made her realize how autonomous cars could help those with disabilities. The question now is how self-driving cars will eventually work. She sees the need for cooperation within the industry to speed up the process.
“We’ll definitely go faster if we work together, and I think others are coming to realize this. In an industry long known for proprietary engineering, we are seeing many companies join forces in the race to solutions. Our agreement with BMW and Mobileye to put approximately 40 autonomous test cars on the road by the end of 2017 is a great example of how collaboration accelerates results. Joint ownership of HERE between Audi, Daimler, BMW and now Intel will further illustrate how the sharing of knowledge will move us forward.”
She believes there will be a need for standards “Getting past our test phase and into the mainstream will require some kind of agreement on a few key standards.”
“The autonomous car community will need a way to take advantage of the information collected by all of those autonomous vehicles so that every OEM or supplier doesn’t have to log and track their own data and create their own driving models. Every autonomous car out there shouldn’t have to find the same pothole and log it. Sharing some amount of base code and data would allow cars to share this information with each other easily and help answer the question of “how?””
She ends by stating, that “Although elf-driving cars couldn’t arrive soon enough to help me get around on my broken ankle, they’re coming fast. We’ve made years of progress in just a few short months, and I see 2017 as a year when collaboration and standardization will help us accelerate even more. I’m thrilled to be on a team that is reinventing mobility in the 21st century. What a ride it will be.”
Kathy Winter joined Intel in 2016 from Delphi, where she engineered the first cross-country drive of a fully autonomous vehicle.