Bosch has partnered with Foreca, a Finnish weather forecasting company, to offer connected vehicles detailed information about road conditions.
The basic service will launch in 2020 using just weather data, but will be expanded later with data from vehicles.
To allow AVs to drive safely at all times, they need to be able to adapt their driving style to the road conditions. Therefore, they need information about the weather, ideally live info.
Bosch estimates it would take some 20 million connected cars to cover the roughly 80,000km of motorway in Europe alone. For this reason, road-weather forecasts will initially be the only reliable source of information for drawing sound conclusions about road conditions, especially in rural areas where there is less traffic (and fewer vehicles to gather data).
After examining a number of leading weather data providers, Bosch decided to source its data from Finnish company Foreca. Thanks to a worldwide reference measuring fleet and machine-learning methods, Bosch and Foreca are jointly optimising the safety and availability of the road-weather models.
At a later stage, Bosch will use data from the vehicle’s CANbus and central data network (such as inside and outside temperatures and whether the windscreen wipers are in use).
In addition, it will use information about the number and nature of stability control interventions to determine the friction coefficient of the road surface.
By Illya Verpraet