Connected Car News: Vroom, McLaren, OPPO, Solace & HERE

In connected car news are Vroom, McLaren, OPPO, Solace and HERE.

Vroom Partners with Santander

Vroom an innovative ecommerce platform that offers a better way to buy and sell used vehicles, announced a multi-year strategic preferred lending relationship with Santander Consumer USA, a full-service consumer finance company focused on vehicle finance and third-party servicing. The partnership is designed to enhance Vroom’s customer experience through a streamlined financing process and competitive lending rates. The new relationship will make it even easier for Vroom customers of all profiles to obtain auto loan financing. The two companies have begun operationalizing the partnership and will continue to refine and enhance aspects of it through 2020.

New McLaren Films

A series of short films created to provide insight into the technologies behind the McLaren brand and cars will be shared across McLaren media channels in the coming weeks. Designed to educate, entertain and inform McLaren fans and customers alike, they can be accessed from the comfort of home via the McLaren Automotive social media and YouTube channels as well as the cars.mclaren.com website.

McLaren Tech Club (#McLarenTechClub) is designed for those who want to delve deeper into the core of every McLaren car while also increasing their automotive knowledge. The new films explore the innovative technologies developed by McLaren designers and engineers to help deliver the incredible driving experiences for which the pioneering supercar company is renowned.

The first film – titled ‘How does the McLaren Elva keep you comfortable at 70mph without a windscreen?’  – looks at the revolutionary ‘Active Air Management System’ (AAMS) of the new Elva, the latest McLaren Ultimate Series roadster and a car that is instantly recognisable because of the absence of a roof, windscreen or windows.

The new Elva has been designed to distil elements of driving pleasure into one incredible open-cockpit car. Fundamental to this is the world-first ‘Active Air Management System’, which creates a ‘bubble of calm’ for both driver and passenger despite the car not having a windscreen. In the Tech Club film, McLaren Automotive Director of Engineering Design Dan Parry-Williams, takes viewers through the innovative solution to deliver a comfortable drive at 70mph with no physical barrier to airflow in front of a driver or passenger, ensuring an incredibly immersive and enthralling experience.

“With absolutely nothing between you and the wind coming at you, would it be possible to create a virtual canopy? That was the challenge we set ourselves with the design of the new Elva.”
Dan Parry-Williams, Director of Engineering Design, McLaren Automotive

Presented in an easily accessible style, the McLaren Tech Club content is designed for viewers of all ages. The second film – released on April 9 – is titled, ‘What makes the McLaren Senna GTR’s wing design so unique?’ Featuring Esteban Palazzo, Principal Designer at McLaren Automotive, discussing the incredible carbon-fibre rear wing, it can be viewed here: https://cars.mclaren.com/en/latest/post/tech-club-2-sennagtr. The Elva AAMS film is available at: https://cars.mclaren.com/en/latest/post/world-of-mclaren-tech-club.

OPPO Licenses Patents

Leading global technology brand OPPO announced that it would license its worldwide 3G and 4G standard-essential patents to the IoT and automotive markets through leading patent licensing platform Avanci. The company that has been at the forefront of innovation in the smartphone market is diversifying its portfolio to include frontier technologies such as IoT, 5G and Augmented reality (AR), to provide more immersive and personalized technological experiences to users worldwide.

Solace and MobiledgeX Partner

Solace, the leading enabler of real-time event-driven data streaming for enterprise computing, IoT and mobile applications, and MobiledgeX, which is making edge computing widely accessible and easy to consume, announced a partnership designed to help automakers offer hyper-personalized mobility services that enhance safety and convenience for drivers.

Collaborative and intelligent transport networks hinge on the efficient, reliable and real-time distribution of data between cars, other road users, infrastructure and applications. Solace is uniquely qualified to meet that need with its complete event streaming and management platform, Solace PubSub+ Platform. Some of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers use PubSub+ to stream events across their enterprise, including Groupe Renault and Groupe PSA.

MobiledgeX’s innovative Edge-Cloud technology leverages 5G connectivity to provide the critical connectivity layer required to establish reliable and real-time vehicle, infrastructure, and mobile device connections. By integrating the sophisticated real-time routing capabilities that PubSub+ offers into the connectivity layer, Solace and MobiledgeX are unlocking the potential to deploy innovative mobility services in and around vehicles.

Three key attributes make the Solace and MobiledgeX joint solution a game-changer for automakers by enabling the aggregation of events across enterprises and ecosystems:

  • Predictability (Control over Latency): Automakers can expect end-to-end network latency of fewer than 10 milliseconds, and end-to-end business service latency under 50 milliseconds.
  • Seamless Interconnectivity: The joint solution can connect all modes of transportation and other assets across fleets, carriers, borders, agencies, and ecosystems.
  • Shared Security Model: Trusted security within and across a global, multi-operator network infrastructure reduces the enterprise’s requirements in a shared responsibility model.

“PubSub+ has proven ability to meet the demand of high-volume connected vehicle initiatives that link tens of millions of vehicles with cloud and on-premises systems. We’re excited to partner with MobiledgeX to accelerate the potential of 5G connectivity for enterprises with their innovative Edge-Cloud platform,” said Paul Fitzpatrick, Solace’s chief business development officer. “We believe our partnership with MobiledgeX can accelerate the value achieved from a new age of mobility services for our customers.”

One example of a safety-critical system that could be deployed using Solace and MobiledgeX is a ‘vulnerable road user warning’ system. The precise location, speed and direction of vehicles approaching an intersection are monitored in real-time – along with pedestrians and cyclists. An analytics engine running on the edge could use these event streams to identify and predict an apparent collision course and send warnings to the drivers, or even commands to the car to stop.

“Non-line-of-sight safety scenarios require real-time collaboration between all traffic participants, including road-side equipment,” says Ricardo Gomez-Ulmke, Solace’s vice president of IoT. “The ability to offer services with millisecond response times, guaranteed by service level agreements, means service providers can guarantee the safety of road users, across borders, 24×7. This gives them the power to re-invent the future of mobility.”

HERE top Rated Location Platform

For the third year in a row, HERE Technologies was named by Counterpoint Research as the world’s number one location platform. The 2020 Counterpoint Research Location Platforms Evaluation and Analysis compared the 25 leading location platform vendors, including Google, TomTom and Mapbox, in capabilities and execution.

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