German automotive manufacturing company Continental has become the latest to join the self-driving consortium formed by BMW, Intel, and Mobileye. Continental joins as a system integrator.

The goal of the consortium is to ‘establish a new cooperation model for highly and fully automated driving that will provide scalable solutions’ for the global automotive industry. Continental’s role in this is to aid the industrialisation of the platform for other carmakers and ensure the joint solutions are brought to the market more quickly – with a focus on function development and integration of systems.

“Such partnerships have a great advantage with regard to the complexity of the technology as well as the development efforts: we do not need to reinvent the solutions developed by any of our partners,” said Karl Haupt, head of the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems business unit at Continental. “After all, we can utilize their knowledge and draw upon already tried and tested examples on the road and adapt these to the most diverse customer needs. Together with the partners involved, we can work more efficiently on research and development tasks in order to realize the next generations of the technologies for automated driving.

“In addition, this collaboration will provide solutions that are more cost-effective for our customers and affordable to end users.”

Last month, auto parts manufacturer Delphi joined the consortium as a systems integrator and development partner, acting much in the same manner as Continental will.

At the beginning of the year, BMW, Intel and Mobileye announced their intention to bring a fleet of 40 self-driving BMW 7 Series cars to the roads by the second half of this year.