Intel and BMW's highly-automated cars hit the road

Intel is great at building chips for computers. Everything else, not so much. But the company that's been powering most of the computers on the market for decades is going full bore into autonomous cars. Today it announced the launch the first vehicle of its highly automated car test fleet with partner BMW. The vehicles will also include technology from Intel's latest acquisition, Mobileye.

At an event in San Jose, Intel vice president of the automated driving group Kathy Winter unveiled the first of 40 BMW 7 Series highly-automated cars it'll be testing on the road. All the cars are expected to be on the road by the end of the year. All the vehicles will include multiple Mobileye cameras for road scanning.

The event was held at the company's new Intel Autonomous Driving Garage. Winter said that while it looks pretty today, it'll be a working space where self-driving technology will be researched and launched.

Update: An earlier version of this article indicated the cars would be autonomous. The cars will be highly automated.