6 April 2016, USA :
Amazon and Microsoft are in talks about taking a minority stake in HERE, a digital mapping business controlled by Germany’s luxury carmakers to help develop self-driving cars, Daimler said on Wednesday.
Germany’s luxury carmakers including Daimler’s Mercedes, Volkswagen, Audi division and BMW bought HERE for 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) from Nokia last year to create an alternative digital mapping business to Google.
“We are talking to Amazon, Microsoft and many auto makers,” Thomas Weber, a Daimler board member in charge of research and development, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. A Daimler spokesman on Wednesday confirmed the remarks.
Amazon and Microsoft were in talks with the carmakers since last week.
The consortium needs cl
oud computing providers to manage the mass of data collected from sensors on board thousands of Mercedes, BMW and Audi cars. The data about traffic and road conditions is then fed into digital maps.
Intelligent mapping systems supply information to control self-driving cars, which are equipped with street-scanning sensors to measure traffic and road conditions. This location data can in turn be shared with other map users.
Source : WSJ
Image : cnbc.com