Talking further on the subject of autonomous driving. At Frankfurt Motor Show this week a member of BMW’s board of management Klaus Frohlich put some reasoning into the argument that in just a few years we’ll be sitting back and reading the paper while our car drives itself down the road. Frohlich suggested fully autonomous level 5 driving technology is not yet available for mass market production. The main problem he suggests is the required testing compared to what any car company has done before – as he said “I needed less than five million kilometres to develop the new 5-series model –on autonomous driving level 5 I have to do 150 million test kilometres and I can’t do that on the road so I have to build very big computing main frames, up to 500 petabytes to calculate 95 per cent of our driving in virtual environments.” Autonomous driving stories make for great reading but the technology requirements are still some years away. I’m David Berthon

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