Self-Driving BMW 7-Series Auditions For Next Ghostbusters — Scares Off White Walker Wannabe

German luxury carmaker BMW recently announced its new D3 (Data-Driven Development) platform for autonomous driving. To show how normal the future of cars is for normal people who are still part of the living world and not a white walker wannabe, the German carmaker released a video showing a fully autonomous BMW 7 Series scaring off a ghost on a rather deserted road.

While the video claims that self-driving cars will not be scary at all, the reactions of the engineer looking at the video tells us otherwise, though that could just be because of the icicle-causing ghost, the car stopped to allow past on the lonely road. Considering the apparition seemed to be rather solid, the self-driving BMW does seem to know how to work properly as it did come to a halt after spotting the 'ghost'.

While the video is funny in its own way, it is actually a promo for BMW's new Data-Driven Development platform for autonomous driving, which will see the German luxury carmaker collect approximately 5 million kilometres worth of data using its fleet of autonomous test cars like the 7 Series limousine seen in the video above.

BMW will then extract two million kilometres worth of the most relevant driving scenarios and environmental factors, which will be further expanded by a further 240 million kilometres of simulation-generated data, which is primarily based on the relevant driving conditions ensuring that the development of autonomous cars will take into account the immense diversity of real-life driving scenarios.

For those taking note, BMW claims it will be collecting around 1.5 terabytes of data every day with its new D3 platform. The carmaker claims the data will be stored at its autonomous driving campus that was opened last year and has a total storage capacity of 230 petabytes. All this data should help researchers and engineers get fully self-driving cars onto the world's roads in the future. However, that could be a long wait, with Level 5 Autonomy currently said to be quite a few years away from hitting the roads.