Through its cloud-based Open Location Platform, HERE plans launching real-time automotive data services based on on-board sensors of connected Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles. This is an industry first, with competing premium car brands joining forces to launch next-generation traffic flow and incidents, hazard warnings (accidents, extreme weather events and other road conditions), traffic signage (permanent and temporary speed limits), and on-street parking information services to make driving safer and more convenient immediately as well as preparing the arrival of future autonomous vehicles through the automatic generation of high-accuracy maps.
Rich sensor data will be derived from a variety of deeply embedded vehicle sensors such as cameras, (fog) lights, windshield wiper rain sensors, and power train metrics and enriched with data from other sources followed by the application of advanced real-time and predictive analytics on the aggregated data sets.
Non-HERE consortium car brands will also be allowed to contribute data and participate in and benefit from the community effort. HERE’s strategy firmly backs collaborative, secure, standardized and open approaches while maintaining privacy through anonymizing data. The aim is to leverage the Sensoris vehicle data standard, recently adopted by Ertico-ITS Europe, to facilitate data sharing across the entire automotive industry.
Clearly, HERE aspires to become the de facto standard for scalable vehicle data sharing, as opposed to earlier isolated attempts by Volvo (ice on road trial) and the PSA-BMW partnership on big data analytics for services such as hyperlocal, ultraprecise weather information. While some of the largest car OEMs might still prefer going it alone, consensus around the need for far-reaching cooperation and collaboration within the automotive industry to address a range of new paradigms is growing fast.
