Starting this summer, BMW’s Driving Assistant Professional package will come with a few new functions, to make highway driving a tad bit more autonomous. This new host of features is the fruit of BMW’s efforts in the autonomous driving field, where it has been involved for quite some time now alongside its partners like Mobileye, Delphi or Intel.
By offering these functions, incremental additional steps are being made towards a fully autonomous vehicle.
This can also be seen as a preview of what the iNext will bring to the table, the halo car which will be unveiled in 2021. The very same iNEXT is being touted as the most advanced model the Bavarians ever made.
The focus of the new functions is on the steering and lane guidance assistant. The new Active Navigation Guidance system will indicate lane changes that are necessary in order to continue driving along the selected route when destination guidance is active.
According to BMW, the driver can switch lanes using the lane change assistant, but there’s no mention of whether the car will switch lanes by itself or not. In certain countries this has been possible for quite some time but legislative limitations forced BMW to disable this options in other regions of the world.
A new Emergency Lane Assistant function will also be introduced, which automatically guides the vehicle to the ideal edge of its lane in congested situations on motorways.
The Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop & Go function will also be updated and will include an adaptive distance control that adjusts itself according to the traffic and environmental conditions. On top of that, the Speed Limit Info and No Passing Indicator will have better functions.
They will now take into account speed limits that are restricted in time and only apply on certain days of the week. These functions will be available on the BMW 3 Series, BMW 5 Series, BMW 6 Series and BMW 8 Series, in the BMW X5, BMW X6 and BMW X7, and in all variants of the BMW M5 and BMW M8 starting this summer.
