In-car Google Local Search with BMW ConnectedDrive
In March, BMW introduced Google Maps Send to Car in Germany. As of today, we've expanded this service to all of our European BMW Assist customers. In addition to Google Maps Deutschland, you can now send businesses from Google Maps …
Context & Ripple Effects
The service went live in Germany only this past March, when BMW first wired Google Maps into ConnectedDrive's Send to Car; today's expansion takes the same integration to every European BMW Assist subscriber. There is a pointed backstory here: in early 2006 Google caught and penalized BMW's German site for manipulating results on 'used car', so within roughly eighteen months the two companies have moved from search-penalty antagonist to embedded in-car partner.
What matters is the division of labor: BMW contributes the telematics pipe through BMW Assist, while Google supplies continuously updated local business data that a carmaker would otherwise have to maintain itself.
First-order effects
- European BMW Assist customers can now send businesses found on any European Google Maps directly to their car's navigation system for routing.
- BMW's ConnectedDrive gains a live local-search capability without BMW licensing or maintaining a proprietary points-of-interest database.
Second-order effects
- Rival premium automakers' navigation offerings, still built on static POI datasets, come under pressure to strike similar deals with web mapping providers to match freshness and breadth of destination data.
- Google establishes the car dashboard as a new distribution endpoint for its local search inventory, extending ad-relevant reach beyond the PC.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, in-car navigation shifts from a closed, carmaker-owned feature to one assembled from third-party web services — which makes control of the dashboard's default search provider a strategic battleground between automakers and internet platforms.
The trend: Carmakers are increasingly renting consumer web services like local search for their dashboards instead of building proprietary telematics content, making the in-car interface a contested platform layer.