HERE launches supercharged Real-Time Traffic service

Amsterdam - HERE Technologies today announced the launch of the new generation of its HERE Real-Time Traffic service.

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.

"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."

Andrew Hart, Director at SBD Labs, said: "High quality traffic information is the cornerstone of a good navigation experience. Traffic information providers often define their capabilities by the number of probes they collect data from, but data richness will increasingly become the defining factor between a good service and an excellent one. The dozens of sensors equipped on modern cars make them the richest possible source of real-time traffic data. HERE has developed a win-win approach to accessing and analyzing rich vehicle data."

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.

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.