Four in five drivers give BMW permission to use their driving data, giving the German luxury brand key insights into future driving assistance technology
BMW developers have confirmed they are using a pool of more than 1.2 billion kilometres of real-world data from customer cars to design their next generations of software and hardware.
The project manager of the new BMW 7 Series limousine, Christoph Fagschlunger, has admitted BMW has been collecting data from their customers’ cars for the past three years – but only with their permission.
The data is being used to develop everything from the next generation of driver-assistance features to learning what is actually used most in infotainment systems, he confirmed.
The system involves participating BMW cars sending packets of data back to the German car-maker’s technical centre in Munich every time the cars are switched off, the engines are shut down during an idle-stop or, in the case of EVs and plug-in hybrids, the vehicles are charging.
Fagschlunger expects to have more than two billion kilometres of anonymous real-world data drawn down by the end of this year.
“We only do this with the permission from each customer – they have to give it – and nearly 80 per cent of customers do so,” the engineer explained.
“With this approach we have gained about 1.2 billion kilometers out of the customer fleet.
“It shows us things like where the active cruise is used, the lane control, how is it used, is there degradation of the systems and is the customer happy to use it?”
Some of the data, he admitted, has led to heavy conversations with product planners and designers about what technology is really necessary to develop compared to what customers actually use.
“The customers with Professional version of the navigation use active cruise control for 60 per cent of the whole drive time, which surprised us,” Fagschlunger said.
“But the assistance for the steering, lane keeping, is just 36 per cent. Some customers order the full set-up, but then, in the modes, they turn the steering assistance off.
“We are analysing why. It’s totally different on the geo-regions and we have to go through the data to determine if it is because of dense traffic, or road conditions, and then that is used for data-driven improvements.
“We see all this, and we also see how heavy is the usage on the sub-features.”
One of the keys to the data is accessing it without having to trawl through millions of lines of information, and BMW uses crowd-data collector scripting to catch its ‘fish’.
“The developer can decide what is relevant to him or her and what they want to get answered out of the fleet data,” said Fagschlunger.
“So he can say, from tomorrow at 8:00am onwards, I want to find all the 5 Series vehicles with V8 engines in New York taking right turns at traffic lights and what do they see in that situation.
“They can then clearly have a filter on whatever they want, and not only big data.”
The real-world data has driven BMW to switch up its Level 2 and Level 3 driver assistance programs from acting like a computer driving on the road to behaving more like human drivers, without breaking the law.
