BMW Finds A Spooky Way To Promote Autonomous Driving

BMW is hard at work developing advanced self-driving features for its vehicles and has previewed its latest developments in the field with a video inspired by the horror movie genre.

The clip shows a BMW 7-Series testing BMW’s autonomous systems in the woods when suddenly, it’s forced to stop in the middle of the road where some type of creepy apparition can be seen standing.

The woman then approaches the BMW but completely freaks out when she realizes that there is no one behind the wheel. The car is driving itself.

In a bid to further the development of its autonomous technologies, the car manufacturer recently announced the BMW Group High Performance D3 platform. The D3 platform stands for Data-Driven Development and forms a core part of the company’s belief that it needs to gather vast quantities of data to map the complexity and variety of traffic situations which forthcoming autonomous vehicles will encounter.

Also Read: BMW And Daimler Join Forces Again To Develop Autonomous Driving Tech

BMW’s initial goal is to process and collect five million kilometers (3.1 million miles) of real-life driving data from its test fleet of vehicles. From this data, two million kilometers (1.25 million miles) of the most relevant scenarios and environmental factors are then extracted. This data then undergoes reprocessing to improve BMW’s understanding of what functions autonomous vehicles need.

BMW is currently testing roughly 80 autonomous 7-Series models across the west coast of the U.S., Germany, Israel, and China, and plans on expending its fleet to approximately 140 cars by the end of 2019.