BMW’s New Open Source Telematics
Don’t let the name throw you. This next generation telematics will filter down to all BMW Group products including potentialy the next generation MINI due in 2012.
Official BMW Press Release: BMW has joined forces with telematics service providers Connexis LLC and WirelessCar to establish a more stable and uniform interface infrastructure for delivering end-to-end telematics services. BMW’s objective in the collaboration was to create a flexible protocol platform open to all telematics providers and vehicle manufacturers, and capable of meeting rapidly changing industry needs. The Next Generation Telematics Protocol (NGTP) is presented at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Customer benefits of NGTP.
NGTP’s flexibility offers customers the ability to conveniently access new services without the hassle of making technical adjustments inside the vehicle. Changing customer needs can also be more rapidly addressed using NGTP which allows for easy swapping out of old services for new offerings.
Infrastructure of NGTP.
NGTP promotes openess and flexibility by separating the components of the telematics delivery chain, and introducing a ‘dispatcher’ to provide a single interface between the telematics unit (TU) in the vehicle and the telematics service provider (TSP). Since the interfaces are technology-neutral, all back-end components including the dispatche, TSPs, call centre and content provider can be easily interchanged. The protocol is flexible for use with all telematics service offerings and in any country. The open interface created by NGTP also enables OEMs to continously provide new services to both legacy vehicles and new models over the entire vehicle lifecycle.
Furthermore, OEMs with existing telematics business models, or those launching telematics services in the future, can benefit from the enhanced service offerings and open integration options resulting from this new protocol.
BMW ConnectedDrive.
Since 1997, BMW ConnectedDrive has played a leading role in delivering state-of-the-art telematics services. Today, ConnectedDrive serves 500,000 customers in 10 countries. Offerings include emergency call, traffic information, information services, Googleâ„¢ local search and internet-based services. As telematics offerings continue to advance and become more relevent to consumers, more providers will enter the industry. As a result, interface standardisation will become increasingly important for integrating and interchanging telematics options. With NGTP, BMW ConnectedDrive continues to lead the industry in delivering innovative telematics products and services to the market.
Couldn’t get worse 😉
I had to read the press release a few times to make heads or tails of what it is trying to say. And I’m an engineer, currently working on a telematics product no less! I guess BMW is pretty consistent at being unintuitive about anything that involves vehicle software.
This about wireless communications in the vehicle and applications that can be built around it. The best known example is GM’s Onstar system. BMW wants to establish an open protocol and standard that they hope the industry will adopt, and as a common standard it would encourage the development of applications by both manufacturers and vendors.
Ditto, can someone explain what this is in laymen’s terms?
I don’t know if this matters but, the FCC is about to auction open cellular frequencies. This is one product that could be affected.
Having read this press release twice and still unable to come up with anything witty to say; I am not above admitting I have no idea what it was about. Perhaps a primer in telematics is in order…
Looking at it again, I think this is meant to be a competitor to OnStar. General Motors is very far ahead of everybody else. It is difficult for other manufacturers to develop their own proprietary systems, hence the requirement to make it an open standard that everybody can share.
Onstar is a pretty solid system. My issues with it stem from privacy issues that come from using it.
I wonder how this compares with the offering from <a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/01/24/in-depth-hughes-telematics-planning-to-outdo-onstar-and-sync/" rel="nofollow">Hughes Telematics</a>?
Isn’t BMW Assist pretty much the equivalent to Onstar anyway, though? C4, what are your privacy issues with Onstar?
At first I thought it would be a whole new user software system to replace the horrible current idrive and MINI equivalent, but rereading it I agree it is more specifically about an OnStar-equivalent, just based on a non-proprietary communication protocol.
Read the OnStar end user agreement and see how your privacy is virtually nil when you subscribe to their service.
Oh and the government has been known to do illegal wiretaps on vehicles equipped with OnStar…
Stuff like this is all over the place, if you know where to look. CANopen is looking at a gateway standard for allowing third parties to hook into the car without screwing with the factory installed stuff. One item that’s been floated is a 2.5 gigabit per second (25x most household ethernet bandwidths) multi-media bus so that there can be multi-video-streams supported at one time, without every add-on having to add it’s own screens to the car.
About On-Star, the black box capability has been used to convict (I think) people of wreckless driving due to speed violations prior to accidents. All that stuff gets saved and can be reported remotely.
Invation of privcay vs required information reporting for the privalage of driving will be an upcoming debate. Think of all the revenue that could be generated if new cars automatically reported all speed violations based on GPS positioning information….
The possibilites are endless!
Matt