HERE Technologies announced the launch of the new generation of its HERE Real-Time Traffic service. It improves the accuracy of traffic information by tapping into the latest data being collected and shared by connected cars.
It 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 traffic conditions.
HERE Real-Time Traffic, available to all current and future customers from any industry and covering more than 60 countries, 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 new hard-braking sensor data HERE is now processing, this feature now allows more relevant and timely notifications to the vehicle.
HERE already gathers billions of GPS data points every day and leverages over 100 different probe and incident sources to provide a robust foundation for HERE Real-Time Traffic. Now, HERE 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
“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 HERE to make driving safer and more efficient for people everywhere,” said Ralf Herrtwich, Senior Vice President Automotive at HERE Technologies. “While it helps drivers making 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.”
For example, being able to detect road closures is absolutely critical for automated driving — far more so than it is for human drivers. This probe data can help identify road closures faster and more accurately than ever before, and can help point our products towards supporting autonomous vehicles.
The next wave of development towards autonomous vehicles will see more cars get connected, and as they do, more sensors will be used, and more and better data will be available to enrich the capabilities of cars.
HERE Real-Time Traffic provides information about traffic conditions to drivers and can also be ingested by vehicle ADAS applications. The service is also widely used by ride-hailing companies, cities, road transport agencies, logistics companies, and air quality analytics specialists.
The enhanced HERE Real-Time Traffic is the first of the four vehicle-sourced data services HERE announced last autumn to be commercially available. HERE believes these services will support the automotive industry’s broader market introduction of advanced driver assisted systems and, later, autonomous driving solutions.