[razor488]

Seems like they should roll it out within a year since it is listed as part of the i7's packages.

[PhilD]

Who knows what they're planning. In June last, BMW said they would introduce Level 3 autonomous driving in 2022 and that the first model to bring level 3 features would be the iX. In January this year, BMW were supposedly due to release a 'Level 3 autonomous driving update shortly' for the iX. In March, their goal was to 'expand Level 3 self-driving capability from the iX and upcoming 7-series to more of the BMW lineup by 2025'. The goalposts seem to be constantly changing. The promise of level 3 driving has been a pretty big selling point for the iX though, as has BMW's talk of the much more advanced on-board computer system in the iX, ready for more advanced self driving tech. To put it bluntly, they'd piss of a fair number of buyers if they then fail to deliver on software updates that give that tech. If it takes them 3 years though, it'd be close to the time that a lot of early buyers would be looking to upgrade their cars anyway, so they'd be more likely to get away with it without too many complaints. Still, they'd look bad compared to Tesla's driving updates many years after release so I hope they'll adapt to provide more software updates than they did before level 2+ or level 3 vehicles were a thing.

[hugo_nz]

Originally Posted by scania

I rather suspect that the long range radar will be replaced by LiDAR on March 2023 onward.

More like 11.2023 per the documentation available in BMW AIRsoft. March 2023 would indicate an OTA since it ties in with established software releases (My IX had 3.2022 > 7.2022 and will soon be on 11.2022). Following this logic the next version will be 3.2023.

[Nahida]

Originally Posted by PhilD

When it comes to Highway Assistant, there's no reason the hardware in the iX as it is couldn't do it. Lidar is basically just a higher resolution Radar. Unless BMW wants Highway Assistant to tailgate automatically to mere millimetres, the accuracy of radar is more than enough. The area where Lidar is going to help (provided the system it's connected to has sufficient computation ability to deal with the higher resolution properly) is lower speed driving, in particular unpredictable city driving where there are cars parked everywhere, cars coming the other way and barely enough space to get through. I mean European city driving here, to be clear, not the US/Canada style roads in cities.

If BMW doesn't enable Highway Assist on existing iX models then it will be purely a financial decision. Not a technological one. Even if they blame it on technology. They've hinted a few times at the plan for new driving tech to become available for existing models, in contrast to how they've handled software updates in the past but I'll see it when I believe it.

My guess is it will depend on how long it actually takes them to get Highway Assistant to the market. If it's 1 year, then they might enable it for existing cars. If it's 3 years then they'll likely make it new cars only. That's just my gut feeling though.

That's not how those radars work. Having worked at a self-driving company for a while in the past, I think most people underestimate the difficulty involved with sensor fusion. The data you get from a Lidar is completely different from what you get from a LRR, and you have to account for their own characteristics when tuning and combining them together. This requires a huge amount of time and road testing. From an engineering perspective, Tesla's vision-only approach is actually much easier (albeit with the cost of being less robust).

With that said, considering Highway Assistant has already launched on i7 that doesn't have Lidar yet, it should be perfectly doable to ship this feature to existing iX via OTA. Afaik, both iX and i7 are using the EyeQ5 so it should be fairly easy. However, I would not expect existing iX to receive any future L3-level feature via OTA. Even if L3 is technically possible without Lidar, they would not go through the trouble of maintaining two versions of the system that need to behave similarly.