BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye have partnered to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts a reality.

By 2021, the three firms from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries will bring solutions for completely automated driving into series production.

Mobileye co-founder, chairman and CTO professor Amnon Shashua said: "Together with BMW Group and Intel, Mobileye is laying the groundwork for the technology of future mobility that enables fully autonomous driving to become a reality within the next few years."

"With this technological leap forward, we are offering our customers a whole new level of sheer driving pleasure whilst pioneering new concepts for premium mobility."

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said: "We bring a broad set of in-vehicle and cloud computing, connectivity, safety and security, and machine-learning assets to this collaboration enabling a truly end to end solution."

BMW AG chairman of the board of management Harald Krüger said: "Following our investment in high definition live map technology at HERE, the combined expertise of Intel, Mobileye and the BMW Group will deliver the next core building block to bring fully automated driving technology to the street.

"We have already showcased such groundbreaking solutions in our VISION NEXT 100 vehicle concepts.

"With this technological leap forward, we are offering our customers a whole new level of sheer driving pleasure whilst pioneering new concepts for premium mobility."

The BMW iNEXT model will be the basis for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy.

It will set the basis for fleets of completely autonomous vehicles, not just on highways but also in urban environments.

The goal of the partnership is to develop future-proofed solutions that will allow drivers to not only take their hands off the steering wheel, but touch the ‘eyes off’ (level 3) and ultimately the ‘mind off’ (level 4) level.

This fourth level of autonomy will enable the vehicle to achieve the final stage of traveling ‘driver off’ (level 5) without a human driver inside.

In the near term, the firms will showcase an autonomous test drive with a highly automated driving (HAD) prototype.

By next year, the platform will extend to fleets with extended autonomous test drives.