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Intel Sees Opportunity At Every Layer Of The Robot Car Economy

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Intel Corporation

Intel is gearing up to supply the processors, sensors and algorithms that robotic vehicles need to deliver convenience and safety for passengers. But the tech giant is equally upbeat about business opportunities for in-vehicle services and aggregating massive amounts of data that autonomous trips will generate.

“There's a lot of technology in the car, all the way out through the cloud,” CEO Brian Krzanich told Forbes recently. “We’re looking at it as this ecosystem that we get to build into. It's more silicon than just the processor.”

The past year has underscored how intensely focused it's become on helping carmakers transform their products into robotic chauffeurs. Intel has alliances with BMW and Delphi, a chip partnership with self-driving car leader Waymo and bought computer vision firm Mobileye this year for more than $15 billion to dramatically amplify its role as a top-tier automotive tech supplier. It’s even working with Warner Brothers on ways to entertain future passengers of with video streaming and augmented reality windows.

The pace of activity is accelerating because the market that autonomous vehicles are expected to create is too big to ignore. Intel this year estimated revenue from the self-driving car “passenger economy” could reach $800 billion annually by 2035 and swell to $7 trillion by 2050.

Along with ride fees and revenue from in-car services, Krzanich sees simple “secondary” businesses being created from data pulled in by large fleets of cloud-connected vehicles with advanced vision systems.

“Almost every city in the world spends millions of dollars paying people to go out and map all the potholes so that each spring you go and do pothole repair,” he said. “Autonomous cars could collect that data literally for free and then give that back to cities at a much reduced price.”

“Downed signage or … real time data about streets, what condition are they in? What needs to be repaired? What got broken last night? What lights are out on the streetlights when you're driving around at night? Cities are paying for that now. We can provide that with a much better and more real time capability.”

Along with the ability to continuously share traffic conditions and update high-definition maps across a data platform, autonomous cars can help provide more mundane conveniences. “We can tell you how many cars are in line at the Starbucks or McDonalds drive-through before you get there,” Krzanich said.

“When you start to think about it, there's almost an untold or infinite number of business opportunities as you start to think differently.”

Intel Senior Vice President Doug Davis On In-Car Entertainment

In addition to multiple automotive partners, Intel is building its own 100-car autonomous fleet to refine its computing and sensor systems and test future services. One of those vehicles, the Autonomous Vehicle Entertainment Experience prototype it will create with Warner Brothers, will showcase virtual and augmented reality technologies integrated into the windows and front console, as well as video streaming, for immersive in-car entertainment.

Not every rider will want to take a ride in a virtual Batmobile traveling through Gotham City, one option for the system suggested last week, but undoubtedly in-car VR and AR will become a delivery system for advertising.

Like Intel, entertainment companies see vast potential from the driverless car space, Thomas Gewecke, Warner Brothers’ chief digital officer and executive vice president for strategy and business development, said last week at the Automobility LA tech conference in Los Angeles.

"When you think about the sheer volume of cars on the road in the world today, the amount of time you'll spend driving, we think the emergence of autonomous vehicles represents one of the biggest potential expansions of time available for entertainment that we've seen for a very long time."

Warner Brothers

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