Qualcomm partners with Great Wall Motors for smarter cars

Representatives from Great Wall Motor and Qualcomm

Qualcomm has announced that it's partnering with Great Wall Motors (GWM), a Chinese company, to help make their vehicles more intelligent. GWM will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride Platform to build a system dubbed Coffee Intelligence and use it in some of its vehicles from 2022.

With Coffee Intelligence, the vehicles will offer users L2+ and L3 intelligent driving capabilities. Qualcomm even went as far as to claim that GWM vehicles could be upgraded to have sufficient hardware capabilities of providing L4 and L5 features which would allow the vehicle to drive around without any assistance in certain areas in the case of L4 and anywhere in the case of L5.

To deliver these advanced features, Snapdragon Ride Platform uses scalable and modular high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision (CV) engines, and cutting-edge GPUs. The firm said that this comprehensive system is both cost and energy-efficient.

Commenting on the partnership, Head of Intelligent Driving at Great Wall Motors Kai Zhang said:

“Data explosion in the era of AI has driven a huge demand for data processing throughput and computing power. Thanks to the high computing capabilities and scalability of the Snapdragon Ride Platform, GWM will be able to offer comprehensive multi-segment capabilities in our future vehicles, from driver assistance system to high-level autonomous driving. This advanced autonomous driving technology will enable the transformation of GWM from automaker to the ‘global mobility technology company’.”

In the previous decade, we saw Tesla paving the way when it comes to autonomous vehicles but more traditional automobile companies have started giving their vehicles an intelligence boost too. Aside from automation, they’re beginning to take advantage of high-speed networks that are being installed along roads in countries like the United Kingdom. Of course, firms like Qualcomm will also benefit greatly from the shift to intelligent vehicles as they’ll be providing the core components.