Angela Merkel urges: Car companies should join the mobility data room

The federal government is planning a secure platform for mobility data. Companies that deal with mobility should use this to make their data available to developers. The platform should not be operated by a company, but by a non-profit association.

At the car summit on November 17th, Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to present a concrete plan for the project called “Data Room Mobility”, reports the business newspaper Handelsblatt . A pilot project is due to start next spring. Merkel’s goal is to show the system in operation at the World Congress for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in Hamburg in October 2021.

Deutsche Bahn is there

The idea is that as many companies as possible that are involved in mobility should take part. This includes transport companies, especially Deutsche Bahn, but also local transport companies or service providers such as Moia or Flixbus. The German Weather Service is also there. Here Technologies, the manufacturer of precise digital maps, should also participate.

But this includes above all BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen (VW). However, the automobile companies are still hesitant. At the last car summit, their bosses showed interest, but then did not participate, the Handelsblatt learned from the government. Merkel wanted the three of them with her and was applying pressure accordingly.

New applications from driving data

The companies should make vehicle and driving data available to service providers via the platform. On the basis of this data as well as the map and weather data, they should then develop new mobility applications. This could be intelligent navigation services or networked mobility offers, for example. The data should be used against payment.

With such a platform, it is important to know who owns the data and who hosts it. Data sovereignty should be ensured. The data remains on the computers of the respective company. The platform is based on the Industrial Data Space, a system that the Fraunhofer Society developed for Industry 4.0 .

The operator could be non-profit

The operator is a spin-off from the German Academy for Technical Sciences (Acatech), a non-profit association. The government is providing 18 million euros for this. The new company may in turn be a nonprofit.

The mobility data room is intended to create the possibility of using mobility and traffic data in order to develop applications independently of and in competition with the large US data groups such as Google. “For the first time, the mobility data room offers a technically secure, international standard for ‘data sovereignty’ based on European values. Access to the data room is open to anyone who complies with this standard,” said Enak Ferlemann , Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Transport, recently in the Bundestag . “This creates a ‘level playing field’ for voluntary participation in a dynamic, creative trust ecosystem for data-driven innovations in the mobility sector.”