BMW to Outfit Cars for Crowdsourced Data

CARS.COM — BMW this week announced plans to team with Intel and Mobileye, a company that develops driver-assistance and self-driving technology, to generate real-time data from “newly developed” BMWs that hit the market in 2018. Starting then, certain BMWs will employ data-generation technology from Mobileye that contributes to crowdsourced traffic, weather, road hazards, parking and more.

Related: BMW Demonstrates Holographic Dash at CES 2017

The German automaker isn’t the only one to use Mobileye. The Detroit News reports that Volkswagen, GM and Nissan are also committed to use the tech company’s high-definition mapping system, called Global Roadbook. The companies will work with a mapping partner called Here, which will gather the information to update its maps and cloud-based services for self-driving cars (well, partially self-driving at this point). Here claims its maps are already aboard 100 million cars.

It begs privacy concerns, but BMW promises the data from its cars will be made anonymous. It’s not the first such collaboration with Intel and Mobileye; BMW announced a partnership in January with both companies to deploy 40 self-driving cars across the U.S. and Europe later this year. It wants to make “highly automated driving” a reality by 2021 with its iNext self-driving car.