[NEWS] After Baidu tie-up, BMW taps Tencent for autonomous driving in China – Loganspace

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[NEWS] After Baidu tie-up, BMW taps Tencent for autonomous driving in China – Loganspace


China is BMW’s greatest market, and the German automaker knows in expose heart’s contents to hold the country’s demanding shoppers, its future devices must pink meat up unheard of self sustaining driving functionality.

However to create it itself in China is hardly ever ever that you’re going to be in a unbiased to imagine. The success of self sustaining driving depends in segment on high-definition mapping, a process that requires an gargantuan series of geographic knowledge. By law, foreign entities can’t host China-based completely mostly knowledge with out native partnerships. Apple noticeablyworks with a Chinese language companyto retailer user emails, text messages and assorted forms of digital footprint in the country.

That looks to be regarded as one of many catalysts for BMW’s contemporary partnership with Tencent. The Chinese language tech big, which is most appealing known forWeChatand runs anincreasing cloud computing trade, acknowledged on Friday it’s developing a knowledge computing and storage platform for the German top class carmaker. Reutersreported that the pair plans to launch the computing center by the end of this year in Tianjin, a port city come Beijing.

The tie-up came months after BMW’s earlier knowledge growth in the sector’s greatest passenger car market. In February, Here — a Google Maps different partly owned by BWM —joined forceswith Chinese language navigation service Navinfo which would serve Here score knowledge in the community. It’s most likely by no coincidence that Navinfo and Tencent everysold itsy-bitsy shares in Here three years ago.

As BMW gets more familiar with China’s facet road stipulations, there’s no reason why it won’t apply those knowledge to its freshly mintedsaunter-hailingproject.

Teaming up with BMW will even be a large score for Tencent, which has been inserting more center of attention on enterprise-facing endeavors as its predominant gaming tradecopes with regulatory rigidity. On this planet of transportation, “Tencent is dedicated to assisting car companies in the digital transformation,” acknowledged Dowson Tong, the corporate’s president of Cloud and Orderly Industry, in a press launch.

One other relationship

BMW has previously wanted one other Chinese language tech chief to automate its vehicles. It has been working withBaidu,the country’s greatest search engine supplier with a rising list of man-made intelligence initiatives, on automatic drivingsince 2014.

Final October, the duo ramped up their alliance after the German automaker joined Baidu’s self sustaining driving launch platformApollo. The deal carried larger diplomatic significance asit came aboutthroughout Chinese language Premier Li Keqiang’s dash to in Germany to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Baidu president Zhang Yaqin acknowledged at the time the deal used to be meant to “hasten up the come of self sustaining driving applied sciences that align with the Chinese language market.”

BMW’s relationship with Tencent, on the assorted hand, has previously played out on assorted fronts includingjoint analysisinto self sustaining driving security and checking out that eager Tencent’s eminent Eager Safety Lab.

Baidu and Tencent don’t compete without prolong for his or her core companies, nonetheless every are making a large push into the future of mobility, whether or not the bother pertains to in-car entertainment or self-driving. It’s not odd for tech opponents in China to aim the an identical associate. A spokeswoman for BMW informed TechCrunch that “there isn’t any overlap in the collaboration” and the German company is “cooperating with assorted high-notch Chinese language companies in assorted fields.”

Indeed, the setup with Tencent looks more entire in the origin learn about. The Chinese language company is offering “IT structure, instruments and platforms supporting the entire technique of [BMW’s] automatic driving analysis and vogue,” based completely totally on the spokeswoman. In phrases of Baidu, she cited an example of the pair working on a self-driving safety white paper that also eager ten assorted partners.

That is a roundabout manner of announcing that the Baidu alliance is looser. It’s price declaring that BMW isn’t odd toApollo,which payments itself as the “Android for self sustaining autos”and now counts more than100 auto partnersfrom internationally.

A large network helps generate conversations and capability leads down the facet road, nonetheless preserving it this way would perhaps compromise the depth of “collaboration” — a note that’s too assuredly co-opted by publicists. As Cao Xudong, founder of Chinese language self sustaining driving unicornMomenta,informed TechCrunch earlier, collaboration in the auto sector “calls for deep, resource-intensive collaboration, so less [fewer partnerships] is believed to be more.”

What about the assorted heavyweight Alibaba, which also wants to possess the future of driving? The Chinese language e-commerce andcloud computingcompany has change into pally with express-owned carmaker SAIC, with which it has intention up a joint project known as Banma to compose self sustaining driving solutions. This present marriage methodology BMW will not likely tap Alibaba for automation, an worker at a predominant Chinese language self-driving startup instructed to me.

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