GM and BMW Backs Blockchain Based Data Sharing For More Efficient Self Driving Cars

GM and BMW are two leading brands in the field of automobiles and they have sought for blockchain backed sharing of self-driving data to make the technology more efficient and reliable for the future. Self-driving cars are the future and Tesla has proven it with their various products.

Self-driving cars basically work on the principles of machine learning where the car’s database is fed with numerous cases and scenarios to train it to react perfectly to the physical world conditions. In order to make the future of self-driving safer and reliable, a wider and wiser data set is necessary.

Currently, despite numerous pilot projects of various brands working on self-driving cars, the data set is very narrow since most of the firm keep their data private in their silos. Keeping the current scenario in mind, GM and BMW along with many partners have created the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), in an effort to harmonize the development of distributed ledger technology (DLT) across the car industry.

MOBI is currently working on autonomous vehicle data markets (AVDM) and the next meeting of the group will be chaired by GM. General Motors have been thinking about the self-driving industry for long, and it’s evident from its last year patent filing, which details about a fleet of self-driving cars.

Michal Filipowski, the new AVDM working group chairman and the manager global innovation of General Motors sais,

“I am excited to chair the AVDM working group and kickoff the development of our collaborative efforts with the other OEM [original equipment manufacturers] and supplier MOBI members”

BMW is among the founding members of MOBI and it has hared the same interest as GM to avail wide self-driving data set for the automobile industry backed by the Blockchain technology. BMW has earlier tested the use case of blockchain to track mileage in leased cars.

It also shares the same vision that keeping self-driving data enclosed in silos would disrupt the progress of the industry by many years. Andre Luckow, blockchain lead at BMW Group said,

“With the advent of the blockchain, decentral[ized] data management can be implemented in a privacy-preserving and efficient way. Further, emerging technologies, such as decentral machine learning, secure multi-party confidential computing, and decentral data markets, will provide the fabric for data processing in the autonomous age”

The sharing of data has become a necessity, given the array of data sets required to train the machine to understand the real-world scenario, and how it would react to the events on road.