A three-day conference ended today in Tokyo, where automakers, IT companies and government representatives from around the world deliberated the future of the connected and autonomous car. Notably absent were Google and Apple, and I left the conference with the distinct impression that Google and Apple will be absent in the future, also.
The centerpiece of the connected and autonomous car will be a dynamic map, precise up to a few inches, and containing far more data than a Google map: Is an on-street parking spot becoming available? Has the speed limit changed? Will it rain in 10 minutes? Is there a free bay in a charging station? Ice on the road? School bus? Accident?
Who will produce these maps? Our cars will. Any car attempting to be halfway autonomous needs a sensor suite that goes far beyond Google’s streetview car. Connected to the cloud, millions of these sensor-studded cars will produce dynamic maps as up-to-date as what is seen by the cars in front of us.
And why can’t Google or Apple produce these maps? Their software would need to be integrated with the carmakers’ hardware, and it is becoming plainly evident that carmakers won’t let that happen.
Carmakers around the world are lining up behind Automotive Grade Linux as the operating system for their connected cars. “For the car industry, Automotive Grade Linux is very analogous to what Android did for the mobile phone industry,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of the AGL project. This time, the software won’t be supplied by Google. Under the umbrella of the non-profit Linux Foundation, AGL is an open source collaborative effort of automakers and suppliers around the world.
And why not let Google supply a free Auto-Android? Because it’s not really open source, said Cauchy:
“Their non-fragmentation agreement does not allow taking out parts of it, because Google wants control of the services such as the browser, search, maps, contacts, calendar, and more. A lot of people in the industry do not want that kind of approach. They want to be in control of the relationship with the customer.”
With, said Cauchy, “everything in the car that has a processor running AGL,” the data picked up by the sensors need to be pumped to the cloud, and then back to all cars. This is where the participants at this week’s Tokyo conference come in.
“Four out of five cars sold in Europe and North America already use our maps,” we heard from Ahmed Nasr, head of industry and government relations of the digital mapmaker HERE, a company created after Germany’s carmaker powerhouses Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen jointly spent $3.1 billion to buy Nokia’s mapmaking business in another move to compete with Google and its allegedly free maps. HERE is set to become a powerhouse of dynamic maps. Already, millions of updates are made to HERE maps each day, and the sensors in our cars haven’t quite started pumping data.
HERE’s Japanese counter-part is Dynamic Map Planning Co., a company that has all major Japanese carmakers as investors, as the company’s President Tsutomu Nakajima proudly demonstrated. Soon, Japan will embark on a gigantic field-test of the technology, up and down Japan’s main Honshu island.
Who will be the winner of the mapmaker battle? Maybe both. Automotive News picked up rumors that HERE might be looking for a Japanese partner, and at this week’s conference, it seemed as if HERE and Dynamic Map Planning got along just fine.
One thing is clear: If Google and Apple want to supply the brains of future cars, they will have to build their own. Carmakers appear to be dead-set against Google and Apple, and they don’t seem to need them.
