(September 4, 2018) MUNICH, Germany — The BMW Group’s new Driving Simulation Centre is taking shape in Munich’s Milbertshofen district. In mid-August, the company began construction of the world’s most advanced facility for the simulation of real-world driving situations at the FIZ Research and Innovation Centre in the north of the city.

The new building provides unique possibilities for virtual testing of advanced driving assistance systems and innovative display and control concepts.

This will, above all, strengthen the development expertise of the BMW Group in the field of autonomous driving. A unique feature of the facility is the high-fidelity simulator, in which longitudinal, transverse and rotational movements of a vehicle can be represented simultaneously and therefore very realistically. This allows the BMW engineers to “bring the road into the lab,” in order to conduct studies just as if they were taking place in real-world road traffic. For the first time, urban driving situations — which represent a particular challenge in the context of autonomous driving — can now also be reproduced realistically, allowing vehicle responses to be constantly enhanced.

Automated driving is one of the main technology areas which the BMW Group has designated as being of central importance in its NUMBER ONE > NEXT corporate strategy. These areas are also addressed to a significant degree by the expansion of development capacity at the FIZ. Construction of the new Driving Simulation Centre is part of the FIZ Future masterplan, which calls for the BMW Group’s central development facility to grow by some 50 percent through several stages up to 2050.

The foundation stone for the first phase was laid in fall of 2017 and now the start of work on the new Driving Simulation Centre marks a further stage in the project. It is being built in a central area between the Projekthaus and the Aerodynamic Test Centre. Covering a total floor area of 37,400 square feet, the facility will comprise 14 simulators and usability labs employing 157 people. BMW Group Research is planning to start work here in 2020. The investment in the new Driving Simulation Centre is estimated at around 100 million euros ($116 million).

Advanced driving simulators have become an indispensable tool, especially for the development and testing of driving assistance systems and display and control concepts. They allow the functionality and suitability for customer use of new systems to be tested in detail while still at a very early stage of development. The driving simulator serves as a link between the functional testing of individual hardware and software components on the one hand and road testing with complete systems on the other.

The BMW Group has many years of experience in using such facilities. Back in the early 1990s, static driving simulators were employed in the development of BMW cars. In order to model what happens on the road in even greater detail, the BMW Group has also operated a dynamic driving simulator since 2006. In the face of rising demands on the capacity of these facilities, a further dynamic driving simulator was installed in the BMW Group Research and Technology House in Garching in 2016.



At the heart of the new Driving Simulation Centre are two innovative driving simulators specifically designed to meet requirements for testing highly complex automated driving systems. The new high-dynamic simulator is able to generate longitudinal and transverse acceleration forces of up to 1.0 g. It is used to test new systems and functions by replicating highly dynamic evading maneuvers, full braking and hard acceleration.

An extremely detailed rendering of real-world driving characteristics is provided by the second unit, the high-fidelity simulator: braking and accelerating while cornering, driving in roundabouts and rapid series of multiple turn-off maneuvers can be reproduced with high precision in this simulator’s almost 400-square-meter motion area. This means that, for the first time, complex urban driving situations — which present a particularly wide range of challenges for automated driving systems — can now be replicated under laboratory conditions.

The systems to be tested are fitted in a vehicle mock-up attached to a platform inside the dome of the driving simulator. Mounted on an electromechanical hexapod system, the dome can be moved both longitudinally and transversely by an electric drive while also being turned. In order to give the drivers a realistic visual experience of the simulated driving situation, the dome housing the mock-up is equipped with a projection screen.

Precise synchronization of the projected driving images with the movements of the vehicle creates a highly realistic perception of the simulated driving situation, in which the visual impressions of what is happening on the road and the longitudinal, transverse and vertical acceleration forces acting on the test person merge to create an almost flawless overall dynamic impression. The virtual test drive scenario is completed by a sound simulation which is also matched precisely to the situation portrayed.

In this way, it is possible to create test conditions which until now could only be experienced with real vehicles on the road. When seeking to optimize innovative systems, laboratory testing also has the advantage that selected driving situations can be repeated as often as required. This significantly increases the validity of the results. Furthermore, the driving simulator makes it possible to act out test scenarios which occur only rarely or under unusual circumstances in real life, or which would involve risks and so could not be created for test purposes in a real-world driving environment.

Conversely, findings obtained in the course of real-world road testing can be checked and validated in realistic laboratory simulation.