The crash saw Uber put its autonomous research on hold, but efforts resumed later in the year. This newest vehicle takes the lessons learned by that incident – along with other testing in select US cities – and rolls it into an SUV that’s said to be ready for production.

It’s based on the Volvo XC90, itself refreshed recently. Volvo and Uber inked a deal back in 2016 on driverless vehicles, with the Swedish automaker agreeing to produce a base vehicle for the firm. Although at first glance it may look like a regular XC90, in fact there are numerous differences.

Most significant is the hardware redundancy. The car has back-up systems for several of the key components, including steering, braking, and battery back-up. Should the primary brakes fail, for example, the secondary system kicks in automatically to bring the SUV to a halt.

Cameras and ultrasonic sensors have been built into the front, rear, and sides of the XC90. There’s a camera built into the Volvo badge on the front grille, for example, and further cameras underneath the side mirrors. Each gets its own water-jet washing system, so that road dirt or bugs don’t occlude the car’s systems. Together with the other sensors, it gives the car a 360-degree perspective.

That, though, isn’t enough to make it fully autonomous. For that, Uber adds its own self-driving system, which installs on the top of the SUV. It includes LIDAR, along with more cameras and other sensing technology, plus the computational processing to crunch through all that data generated.

The deal between the two firms has been an interesting one. Back when Uber’s car crashed last year, Volvo was clear that the autonomous technology involved was Uber’s own, not the automaker’s. However, Volvo will be using the base car design for its own driverless efforts, only with different software, among other changes.

“Volvo Cars plans to use a similar autonomous base vehicle concept for the introduction of its future autonomous drive cars in the early 2020s,” the company says. “These technologies, to be introduced on the next generation of Volvo models based on the SPA2 vehicle architecture, will include features designed to enable unsupervised autonomous drive in clearly designated areas such as highways and ring roads.”

If all goes to plan, Uber aims to buy tens of thousands of the cars from Volvo to build out its driverless fleet. For the moment, though, there’ll still be a “Mission Specialist” – Uber’s term for the human safety driver who sits, poised, ready to take over in the case of an emergency – behind the wheel.

At the former Altera facility in San Jose, California, the company better known for powering your laptop and PC outlined its vision for driverless cars over the coming years. While collaboration is the name of Intel‘s game, make no mistake: it sees this as a prime opportunity to sell more silicon.

“We think this is a place where we can be close to potential partners, potential startups,” Kathy Winter, VP of Intel’s Automated Driving Group, said of the center, which will act as a “garage” for the company’s self-driving work moving forward. According to Winter, the positioning is essential because of how it facilitates different teams within the firm working together. “At Intel, this is probably been the best examples I’ve seen of “One Intel”,” she said.

However, there’ll be more than just Intel staff on-site. “The only way we’re going to solve this problem across the industry,” Winter said of autonomous technology taking old, is not by ourselves but by working together.” That means a long list of partners, from automakers, through wireless experts, software developers, and experts in the high-definition mapping self-driving vehicles will demand.

One such example is BMW, which will be providing the donor cars for a new Intel-powered fleet of autonomous testers. Though at first glance they look like your typical 7 Series, look closer and you can see a Mobileye camera array behind the windshield, and a pair of high-resolution GPS sensors on the roof near the satellite radio antenna. Around forty of the cars will be on the road by the end of the year.

The goal isn’t just to make a system for BMW to deploy its own production self-driving vehicles. Instead, the automaker, Intel, and Mobileye will collaborate on a scalable architecture that other car companies can build upon, ranging from select modules – like sensor hubs that pull together camera, radar, and LIDAR data – to an entire turn-key system.

Exactly how that will roll out is unclear at this stage: as BMW’s Kenn Sparks told us, “we have to build it first!” The automaker is counting on the various autonomous platforms in development coalescing into a single, open standard. What BMW is backing may not be the only one to contribute to that, “but we want it to be the best,” Sparks said. BMW has earmarked 2021 as the target for a commercial roll-out.

Whatever the underlying platform, individual cars themselves will have some degree of onboard intelligence, but it’s when technologies like V2V (vehicle to vehicle), V2I (vehicle to infrastructure), and V2P (vehicle to pedestrian) are factored in that autonomous driving will be able to reach a tipping point. That will allow for cars that can report back traffic conditions to their counterparts not yet with line-of-sight to a crash, or for cities to redirect self-driving vehicles around congestion or road works. That, of course, relies on a persistent wireless connection.

“We think of the network like oxygen,” Lynn Comp, senior director of industry enabling for the Network Platforms Group, “people use it, but they don’t necessarily realize they need it.” Comp’s team is working with infrastructure providers like Ericsson to ready the wireless world for the demands of self-driving vehicles and the distributed computing that Intel is betting will be the brains of that.