BMW made its new active-safety suite standard on a single central driving computer

BMW Group said on August 27 that the active-safety functions arriving with its Neue Klasse models would be standard equipment, and that all of them — along with automated driving and automated parking — are managed by a single unit the company calls the Superbrain of Automated Driving. BMW described the central computer as water-cooled and as carrying about 20 times the computing power of the system it replaces. The functions are shown to the driver through BMW Operating System X.

The suite reaches the BMW iX3 first, with the i3, X5 and 7 Series to follow. Among the functions BMW listed were an exit warning that uses the side radars to hold a door shut electronically until a passing hazard clears; an emergency steering intervention that can steer around an obstacle or away from a side-impact risk within the lane, which the company said it was introducing for the first time; evasive steering support extended to animals; and an attentiveness assistant that can bring the car to a controlled stop, set the hazard lights and place an emergency call, while remaining overridable by the driver.

BMW also set out the fleet data behind the work. It said 1.3 million vehicles running the previous assistance generation, whose owners had actively consented to data collection, covered 1.6 billion kilometers across Europe in the past month, producing around 8 million collision warnings and 243,977 active steering or braking interventions. Validation runs at the company’s 600-hectare development center at Sokolov in the Czech Republic.