Here Technologies has launched the new ‘supercharged’ generation of its Real-Time Traffic service, which becomes the first traffic information system to use aggregated vehicle sensor data from competing car brands.
The new version of Here’s system is the first global service on the market that integrates live vehicle sensor data from Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles with traffic probe information, resulting in significantly higher accuracy and more precise information about real-world traffic conditions. Real-Time Traffic is now available to all current and future customers from any industry, and covering more than 60 countries, it offers significant improvements in traffic flow data, especially on arterial roads. For more than 30 of those countries, the service also provides incident information with features such as Traffic Safety Warning. Aided by the new hard-braking sensor data that Here is now processing, this feature now allows more relevant and timely notifications to the vehicle.
Here already gathers billions of GPS datapoints every day, and makes use of over 100 different probe and incident sources to provide a robust foundation for its Real-Time Traffic service. Now, the company is also integrating data from millions of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz cars, with the fleet size expected to further grow during 2018 and beyond. To further enrich the service, Here is concurrently expanding the population of commercial vehicles from which it gathers conventional probe data.
Here’s Real-Time Traffic system provides information about traffic conditions to drivers and can also be ingested by vehicle ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) applications. The service is also widely used by ride-hailing companies, cities, road transport agencies, logistics companies, and air quality analytics specialists. The enhanced Real-Time Traffic system is the first of the four vehicle-sourced data services that Here announced last autumn to be commercially available. The company believes these services will support the automotive industry’s broader market introduction of ADAS and, later, autonomous driving solutions.
“This is the world’s first traffic service to aggregate live rich vehicle sensor data from competing car brands, and it represents a major step by us to make driving safer and more efficient for people everywhere,” explained Ralf Herrtwich, senior vice president of automotive at Here Technologies.
“While it helps drivers make informed decisions behind the wheel today, it also moves us closer to realizing our vision of a live representation of the road environment needed for both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving applications.”
