Traffic Mapping brings together Audi, Mercedes and BMW

Traffic Mapping is forcing a rare camaraderie—in a first, German automakers Audi, Mercedes and BMW are building a coalition. The purpose of the coalition is to build a real-time traffic map service by gathering data from millions of vehicles on the road.

On Wednesday, July 26, the three automakers, launched HERE to sixty countries, an Amsterdam-based mapping service jointly owned Audi, Mercedes, and BMW. While live traffic feeds are already obtained from individual automakers, HERE is the first to combine vehicle sensor data from competing automakers. This is a claim made by the three automakers that own the mapping service.

The three automaker giants are all part owners of the mapping service HERE. However, the service is available to customers across the industry. Some of the prominent features of this service including traffic flow data from over sixty countries. In thirty of those sixty countries, the mapping service offers Traffic Warning Information. The purpose of this information is identifying road accidents, as measured by data. This, in turn, makes it possible to send out notifications in real time to vehicles to potentially mitigate the loss suffered due to these accidents.

Millions of active vehicles of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi are already on the road and the mapping service jointly owned by these three automakers is planning to add more commercial vehicles as sources of data for the real-time Traffic function. HERE’s current clients include logistics providers, city planners, urban transit authorities, ride-hailing companies, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and many others. Additionally, it could be serving autonomous car technology companies in the future.

Right now, more precise and timely traffic condition can be obtained via vehicle sensor data provided by the mapping service HERE. However, the ultimate objective of the service jointly owned by Audi, Mercedes, and BMW is to assist the development of autonomous/driverless cars.

While we may have to wait a bit for driverless cars, hybrid or electric cars are already a reality. Talking about hybrid cars, some of the hybrid cars feature low mileage Japanese engines, engines known to be fuel efficient. Talking about Japanese engines, you can get one for your car by buying Japanese car engines for sale from engine suppliers that offer Japanese replacement engines, used Japanese motors, used engines for sale, used transmissions for sale and other similar engines.

Coming back to the topic at hand, Edzard Overbeek, the CEO of HERE believes that autonomous can navigate the streets efficiently and safely only if they’re equipped with the ability to see all around them. This is something that HERE wants to help manufacturers of autonomous cars to achieve. For this reason, it’s only a matter of time before autonomous car technology companies start working with the mapping service HERE.