The company says that this results in significantly higher accuracy and more precise information about traffic conditions, particularly on arterial roads.
The new service covers more than 60 countries and with more than half of these, the service also incident information with features such as Traffic Safety Warning, which makes use of hard-braking sensor data to provide relevant and timely notifications to drivers.
The company uses more than 100 different probe and incident sources and gathers billions of GPS data points every day and these efforts underpin the new service. To further improve it, HERE is expanding the population of commercial vehicles from which it gathers conventional probe data.
HERE Real-Time Traffic is the first of four vehicle-sourced services that the company announced last autumn to become commercially available. The other three are: HERE Hazard Warnings, HERE Road Signs and HERE On-Street Parking.
HERE believes that these services will support the automotive industry's broader market introduction of advanced driver assisted systems and, later, autonomous driving solutions.
"This is the world's first traffic service to aggregate live rich vehicle sensor data from competing car brands and it represents a major step by HERE to make driving safer and more efficient for people everywhere," said Ralf Herrtwich, senior vice president Automotive at HERE Technologies. "While it helps drivers making informed decisions behind the wheel today, it also moves us closer to realizing our vision of a live representation of the road environment needed for both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving applications."
Andrew Hart, director at SBD Labs, said: "High quality traffic information is the cornerstone of a good navigation experience. Traffic information providers often define their capabilities by the number of probes they collect data from, but data richness will increasingly become the defining factor between a good service and an excellent one. The dozens of sensors equipped on modern cars make them the richest possible source of real-time traffic data. HERE has developed a win-win approach to accessing and analyzing rich vehicle data."
