Autonomous driving is coming, and unsurprisingly Intel believes it should be at the heart of it. At the former Altera facility in San Jose, California, the company better known for powering your laptop and PC outlined its vision for driverless cars over the coming years. While collaboration is the name of Intel's game, make no mistake: it sees this as a prime opportunity to sell more silicon.
Intel has announced plans to acquire a 15-percent ownership stake in HERE, the navigation company. HERE provides a navigation app not unlike Google Maps, and its data is used for relevant technology, including IoT services and automotive applications. This transaction, says Intel, is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, after which point Intel’s nominee will be added to the company’s Supervisory Board of Directors.
Mapping company HERE and car camera company Mobileye are teaming up on self-healing maps for autonomous vehicles, potentially turning traffic into roving cartographers. The deal will see HERE, which is developing HD Live Maps with higher levels of detail for self-driving cars to follow, use Mobileye's data to maintain its accuracy as roadways evolve. However, it will also offer a new way for autonomous systems to localize themselves, potentially more accurately - and working alongside - existing methods like GPS.
The most recent models of cars these days are equipped with all kinds of sensors, and yet traffic services still mostly rely on just one source of data: GPS probe data. HERE, the map making service formerly owned by Nokia and now owned by a consortium of three German car makers, is aiming to change that with four new services of its own. Falling under the collective HERE Open Location Platform, the services will pool data gathered from the sensors of different cars. And these cars won’t even have to come from the same brand.
This week the folks at HERE Maps have changed the name of their most prominent app, HERE Maps, into HERE WeGo. This new app is centered on "working out the best way to get to where [people] want to go." This is for people who want to navigate their own city as much as it is for people that are visiting a city they've never been to before. With HERE WeGo, users are invited to type in their destination and are very quickly delivered a variety of routes and means of travel.
Car sharing and autonomous vehicles are widely expected to cut road congestion, but the future for drivers may not be so clear cut, according to two new studies released this week. The impact of alternatives to individual car ownership is still fairly uncertain, particularly as the long-term market viability of self-driving vehicles remains mired in legal, ethical, and technological questions, with the potential for traffic jams to initially get worse, not better.
Mapping company HERE is driving ahead with its scheme to design the common language for all autonomous vehicles, submitting its Esperanto-for-autos to a vehicle safety standards body. Now dubbed SENSORIS, the car-to-cloud system was announced twelve months ago as an open specification for vehicle sensor data to be collected and transmitted to the cloud by connected vehicles.
Tesla's Model 3 could take pole position in a new breed of near-autonomous vehicles, with the EV debuting a new generation of sensors perfect for real-time crowdsourced data. The upcoming car - which is shaping up to be Tesla's most popular to-date, with over 325,000 people coughing up a $1,000 deposit to stake a spot on the reservations list - is the prime candidate for a new, lower-cost sensor array developed by Tesla hardware supplier Mobileye that's said to offer autonomous intelligence hitherto the realm of R&D labs, but at a fraction of what current hardware costs.
Mapping specialist HERE will pull its apps for Windows 10 smartphones at the end of the month, the company has announced, sending fans of Microsoft's platform into paroxysms of rage. The company, which until late last year was owned by key Windows Phone partner Nokia, confirmed the news today, suggesting that developing a new app for Windows 10 mobile would simply not make good business sense.
HERE's plans for the self-driving future can finally emerge from their autopilot holding-pattern, with the company and its new automaker owners holding a quiet but enthusiastic coming out party in San Francisco today. Representatives from Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler joined HERE execs to talk about the development of high-definition mapping, location-based services, and cars that whisper to the cloud and - eventually - drive themselves.
Audi, BMW, and Mercedes Benz have snapped up HERE, and the digital cartographers are wasting no time in investigating how the luxury cars can shape smarter maps. The deal, which closed late last week and netted former HERE owner Nokia a $2.7bn payout, brings technology like HD Maps - high resolution data ideal for tomorrow's self-driving cars - into the reach of the German trio, but also gives HERE unprecedented access to driving data.
Nokia's deal to sell digital mapping and location services specialist HERE to a trio of German automakers has closed ahead of schedule. The agreement, announced back in August, was initially expected to get regulatory approval sometime early in 2016, but that came through sooner than expected and Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler wasted no time in inking the contract.
