OEM Telematics

Telematics and the road to holistic connectivity: vehicle information data transforms the driving experience.

Aided by positioning and short range technologies, the automotive industry quickly moves towards building vehicles enhancing safety, connectivity, autonomy, and compute power. These improvements transform the driving experience, making it safer and more pleasant to passengers. But achieving this is not an easy quest; it requires engineering expertise taking into account precise positioning for AD (Autonomous Driving) and exhaustive vehicle data coming from cellular and Wi-Fi technologies. It also requires an alignment among the ecosystem players, including automakers, logistic providers and even vehicle insurers. The holy grail would be an integral solution that could monitor the vehicle’s status, track its movements, analyze its surroundings, and exchange data with the cloud, other vehicles, and V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything infrastructure).

A solution of this kind thus requires the alignment of technologies such as wireless communication, positioning technology, sensing, and information processing. In the coming years, Wi-Fi will play a vital role in assembling communication technologies due to its financial viability. Location data, provided by a positioning solution, will be essential for emergency call services, different types of alerts, and other use cases requiring vehicle location data. In parallel, vehicle safety will improve due to the inclusion of V2X-related criteria for roads and highways. Finally, this comprehensive solution should consider a fully inclusive connected in-vehicle experience, a demand of today’s drivers and passengers who look forward to a car experience echoing the one offered by smartphones. In fact, by the end of the decade, around 95 per cent of vehicles worldwide will have access to built-in connectivity.

Over the past 25 years, u-blox has been developing high-precision positioning products integral for advanced OEM applications. Our cutting-edge Wi-Fi 6/6e products are at the stake of the transformation, helping the OEM telematics industry achieve its goals. These products provide wireless connectivity that enables secure, reliable, low-latency communication links for high-definition (HD) video streaming, in-vehicle networking and hotspot. Based on u-blox products, shaping the desired solution is possible.

Use cases in telematics and V2X:

Vehicle-to-everything communication (V2X) V2X communication allows vehicles to communicate autonomously with nearby vehicles, roadside units, and the cloud to exchange vehicle data and relevant traffic, events, and status information to enable value-adding services, from early-warnings, pre-crash information gathering, and traffic flow optimization.	Emergency calls (e.g.: eCall, E911) Emergency call systems, such as eCall, automatically place a voice call to the relevant emergency number in the event of a car accident, along with relevant information on the vehicle’s location, its direction of travel, and other vital parameters related to the incident.
Connected driving experience The telematics system can be used to securely exchange data to enable a variety of value-adding services, including predictive maintenance, insurance optimization, fleet maintenance and management, and updating shared maps with relevant information, offering a fully updated connected driving experience.	Connected driving for autonomous mobility Connectivity is an essential enabler of autonomous mobility, whether it is to deliver updates to online digital SD or HD maps used for the localization function, to increase the vehicles awareness of its surrounds beyond line of sight by sharing vehicle data using V2X, or to enhance road safety by enabling early warning alerts based on data from other vehicles or the cloud.
Software defined vehicle The connectivity component of the telematics system gains even more importance with the emergence of the software-defined vehicle, which allows to expand the vehicles capabilities with the introduction of new services and use cases even during its life cycle, reducing the need for costly recalls and recreating the user experience we are familiar with from our smartphones.

u-blox offering in telematics

u-blox offers a wide range of positioning solutions that adapt to telematic applications together with the corresponding assistance and augmentation services as well as short range (WIFI/BT) connectivity and cellular connectivity solutions.

u-blox has proven its strengths and capabilities in this challenging market, supplying automotive OEMs, Tier-1s, and telematics device manufacturers for over a decade.