German automaker BMW and Chinese tech giant Tencent have teamed up to launch a computing centre for developing semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in China.

(Reuters)

Soumen's key takeaways:

Since BMW is looking to launch its L3 AV in China in 2021, the D3 (Data Driven Development) platform will play a huge role in data collection, simulation, validation and testing.
As BMW has already tied up with NavInfo in February 2020 for collecting local data in China, this partnership will give a huge boost to BMW towards starting AV pilot testing.
This deal will help Tencent to reduce dependency on the gaming segment. Tencent was trying aggressively to enter this future space of the mobility market.
BMW has already been working with Baidu from 2014 in China for the introduction of AVs.
The automotive industry is transforming into a connected and autonomous ecosystem but none of the automakers have expertise in data and computing systems, hence they need local players to build their own ecosystem.

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