BMW · Audi · Daimler's automobile coalition completes acquisition of Nokia's map business "HERE"

Nokia's map business "HERE"Although high-tech companies such as Facebook, Apple, Uber, Amazon and others showed interest in the acquisition, in August 2015,Consortium jointly established by BMW, Audi, Daimler decided to acquire with a huge amount of 2.8 billion euros (about 370 billion yen)Did. And it was announced that the acquisition procedure was completed on December 7, 2015, and it is the situation that the European automakers are likely to become more active towards the development of automatic driving cars at last.

Starting today, it's a new world for HERE ... - HERE 360
http://360.here.com/2015/12/07/new-world-here/

Tesla Building Next Gen Maps through its Autopilot Drivers - TESLARATI.com
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-building-maps-autopilot-drivers/

Originally HERE was planned to complete the acquisition in the first quarter of 2016, but the BMW · Audi · Daimler Consortium completed the acquisition process in a schedule ahead of schedule. About the completion of the acquisition procedure HERE announced on the official blog and has announced that it will accelerate global map business with new shareholders.

According to HERE's scene Fernbach CEO, "The map business, which is an attempt to abstract the real world, has evolved into a real-time expression that changes every minute due to technology evolution," information from various sources In the future I got the backing of the BMW · Audi · Daimler consortium, I will clarify that the map service itself will be executed as an open business in the future as well.


Nonetheless, it is clear that BMW, Audi and Daimler have huge amounts of money to purchase HERE and that there is a major goal of enhancing the technology of the automated driving cars developed by the three companies. It is said that accurate map information is required for an automated driving car to be a safe and comfortable means of transportation, and HERE's service is expected to be utilized to the fullest extent in the development of automatic driving cars. In addition, HERE is expected to further improve the quality of service by receiving data of enormous demonstration experiments conducted by BMW, Audi and Daimler.

Since map data is an important key for an automated driving car, it seems that Google, Apple, Baidu etc. which owns the map service on its own have the right of automatic driving car development. In response to this, the existing automobile maker BMW · Audi · Daimler Consortium has acquired the map information in addition to the existing vehicle development know-how, through acquisition of HERE, it also dominates in the development competition of automatic driving cars There is a possibility to stand.

In addition, as is clear from the fact that BMW has announced the development of an automatic driving car in cooperation with Baidu, a search engine in China, attempts to utilize the map service for the development of automatic driving cars have been made in many ways It seems to be.

Chinese Baidu set up pursuit of Google's automatic driving car with BMW - GIGAZINE


On the other hand, in addition to development competition of electric vehiclesAutomatic operation modeTesla Motors, which is also preceding the development competition of automatic driving car introduction, does not have map service. For this reason, we are working on a strategy of collecting driving data by utilizing Tesla vehicles that are already on the market and used by users, and gathering cloud-based map data. Updated to software version 7.0 and compatible with autopilot mode Model S and Model X are equipped with radar, camera, sonar information applied by applying cloud technology, existing map information updated for automatic use It is a plan to do.