TomTom has released its real-time traffic service in Argentina and Colombia, increasing coverage in South America to four countries with Brazil and Chile, and extending the system’s global reach to 54 countries.
TomTom is renowned for delivering high quality map-based products and the introduction of real-time traffic services in these new countries will offer up-to-date information on road conditions, such as traffic congestion, roadworks and closures. With this information, drivers will be able to find suitable routes that help them to avoid the worst areas and enable them to save significant time during their journeys. The increase in countries offering its Traffic service has helped by the continuous growth in the supply of GPS location trace information to the TomTom traffic fusion engine, which has now surpassed 500 million smartphones, transport systems, and portable navigation devices (PNDs). The company says this increased volume of source data will pave the way for further geo-expansion opportunities in 2017 and beyond.
“Traffic congestion remains a major problem for many countries around the world, particularly in larger metropolitan areas,” said Ralf-Peter Schäfer, head of traffic and travel information at TomTom. “Argentina and Colombia are no different and now we can offer data to enable informed routing decisions taking into account the dynamically changing situation on the road from our real-time traffic information.”
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, TomTom revealed that the majority of OEMs present at the event were currently evaluating its HD Map to develop autonomous driving technologies. The HD Map, including RoadDNA, is a revolutionary, highly accurate, digital map-based product that helps automated vehicles precisely locate themselves on the road and plan maneuvers, even when traveling at high speeds. HD Map provides a 3D lane-level model of the road network, and the RoadDNA layer provides smartly compressed information from the side of the road which, in combination with vehicle sensors, enables localization for autonomous driving.
At CES, Antoine Saucier, managing director of TomTom Automotive, said, “It was not even 18 months ago that we introduced our HD Map and RoadDNA to power the future of driving. Then, as now, we were saying that we were ready for the future, with products to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles.”
The company’s head of autonomous driving, Willem Strijbosch, added, “It has been fantastic to work with global OEMs and Tier 1s, and gratifying to see that our innovative maps are already having such a pivotal role in the future of driving, today. Working with them has enabled us to make great strides in further honing our products to their needs.”
TomTom has also announced it will partner with Microsoft to bring enterprise-grade location-based services to the computer giant’s Azure platform. TomTom plans to integrate its maps, traffic services and navigation software into Azure to make it easier and more flexible for developers to build and manage enterprise, mobile, web and Internet of Things (IoT) applications that are location aware.
