Car makerVolvo has selected Ericsson’s cloud platform to deliver fleet management, telematics, navigation, and infotainment services. The deal will expand to cover delivery of analytics and automation solutions with the arrival of 5G.
The five-year deal covers 120 markets. It is the largest to date for Ericsson’s ‘connected vehicle cloud’ (CVC), the Swedish vendor said.
The supply of services over the platform will benefit, in time, from the rollout of higher-speed, lower-latency 5G services, in time. This rise of 5G will enable new mission critical vehicular applications, including autonomous driving.
The platform is hosted at several geographically distributed centres, Ericsson said. It takes “full account” of legal, security, and privacy obligations in each market, including compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.
Åsa Tamsons, head of business area technologies and new businesses at Ericsson, commented: “By removing complexity in areas such as data legislation and storage management, and improving services latency, our platform enhances the overall user experience.
“Our platform will result in rapid innovation and the faster launch of new services to the benefit of Volvo Cars’ partners and customers. The new platform enables the latest development in telematics, infotainment, navigation, automation, and fleet management.”
The two Scandinavian brands have been working together for some time. Ericsson announced a deal with Zenuity, a joint venture between Volvo and safety tech provider Autoliv, in 2017 to develop an end-to-end platform for safety, advanced driver assistance support and autonomous driving software.
Volvo has been busy besides. The company is looking to “capitalise on and lead” the disruption in the automotive industry. Autonomous driving is an essential growth area for it, it has said. By the middle of the next decade it expects to generate one third of all annual sales from autonomous cars.
To this end, it struck a deal earlier this month with Chinese internet search provider Baidu to jointly develop electric and fully autonomous cars for the Chinese market.
In May, Volvo Cars said it will share anonymised safety data with Volvo Trucks, between vehicles in Sweden and Norway. It also confirmed deeper integration of Google apps and services in its new infotainment system, and a deal with Amazon to allow in-car deliveries of Prime parcels.
In June, it announced it had taken a stake in US start-up Luminar, based in California and Florida, to develop sensor technology for autonomous vehicles.
In July, the company announced a new mobility brand, M, launching in Sweden and the US in the spring of 2019. The new enterprise will offer personalised mobility services, including on-demand access to hire cars, based on a proprietary machine learning platform.
In September, it said its future plans will even disrupt the multi-billion dollar domestic air travel industry.
Just last month, in October, Volvo and chip maker NVIDIA said they have teamed up to bring artificial intelligence to self-driving cars. The pair will develop an AI-enabled core computer for new models from as early as 2020, bringing about advanced driver support systems, energy management technology, and in-car personalisation options.
