HERE to fit Audi, BMW, Mercedes Benz cars with sensors to gather data on traffic conditions and driver actions for real-time digital map service coming 2017
Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz cars fitted with on-board sensors are to share information in real time about on-street parking spaces and roadworks via a digital map service.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff to the German trio's move to own its mapping stack: after sources reported BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz preparing a joint bid for HERE at considerably more than €2B in mid-2015, the newly acquired unit moved within months to explore anonymized sensor data from the three brands' vehicles for next-generation maps. Today's announcement converts that exploration into a concrete product — a real-time service due in 2017 that turns customer cars into the collection network.
First-order effects
- Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles fitted with HERE's on-board sensors start streaming traffic conditions, driver actions, on-street parking availability and roadworks data back to HERE, giving the consortium-owned mapmaker a proprietary live-data feed its rivals must buy or replicate.
- Drivers of the three brands get real-time parking and roadworks information through the 2017 service, making sensor sharing a visible feature of ownership rather than background telemetry.
Second-order effects
- Competing map providers lose the argument that fleet-sourced data is speculative — with three premium OEMs feeding one platform, other carmakers face pressure to join HERE, strike equivalent deals, or accept a data disadvantage in navigation quality.
- The arrangement raises the stakes for in-car software partnerships: BMW's later decision to add Android Auto alongside CarPlay and Mercedes-Benz's subsequent tie-up with Google for navigation show the same OEMs balancing platform openness against keeping the underlying vehicle-data layer in-house.
Third-order effects
- Fleets-as-sensors points toward autonomous driving, where HERE has said anonymized vehicle data underpins next-generation maps — the 2017 service is an early instance of carmakers treating the data layer as owned infrastructure, a logic that culminates in programs like BMW managing Neue Klasse connected-vehicle data on AWS.
- If the pattern holds, industry structure splits between OEM-controlled perception networks and tech-platform navigation front ends, with regulation of anonymized driver data becoming the contested ground between them.
The trend: Connected-car fleets are being repositioned from consumers of maps into distributed sensor networks feeding OEM-owned mapping platforms, with the automakers' data-control ambitions set against their parallel reliance on Google, Apple and cloud partners.