(Reuters) – British electric-van startup Arrival said on Wednesday it had partnered with Here Technologies, a digital mapping company owned by some of Germany’s premium carmakers, to provide location and cloud services for its self-driving vehicles.
High-quality digital mapping systems are crucial for directing self-driving cars, which need to know the precise location of traffic lights, lane markings and other objects that create obstacles. Enhanced performance of its fleets will help reduce carbon emissions, Arrival said.
Major carmakers including Tesla and BMW are adopting the technology despite huge costs, as the auto industry faces tightening Carbon dioxide emissions standards in Europe and China.
Here’s software development tools also provide offline functions including route calculation, location search and turn-by-turn navigation, Arrival said.
Arrival has been developing its own self-driving technologies since 2015 and using that to enable electric-vehicle production. It went public in March through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
(Reporting by Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru and Joe White in Detroit; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
