Shanghai (ZXZC)- BMW China Automotive Trading Ltd. announced on July 15 it has agreed cooperation with NavInfo, a Beijing-based navigation map provider, who will provide BMW's China branch with high-definition (HD) map service for autonomous vehicles, marking a great step on the German automaker's path to autonomous driving in China.

“As one of core technologies for autonomous driving, HD map plays an irreplaceable role in prediction of real-time traffic conditions, driving strategy and driving safety. NavInfo is China's leading location-based service provider and is also a long-term business partner of BMW China. The latest cooperation will give great impetus to BMW's development of autonomous driving deployment in China,” said Jochen Goller, President and CEO of BMW Group Region China.

Compared with conventional road-level navigation map, the HD map is able to offer more precise lane-level details including the width of lanes, the location of hard shoulders, road signals and a variety of obstacles, with accuracy down to a few centimeters.

A large amount of accurate environment data collected by HD map will help BMW's autonomous vehicle to pinpoint objects and grasp what is happening around, so as to pick up and conduct the optimum option at any moment, said the automaker.

BMW is standing on the front line in terms of autonomous driving deployment in China, the world’s most potential market with extremely complex road conditions.

On May 14th 2018, BMW Group officially obtained the Shanghai Intelligent Connected Autonomous Driving Test License issued by Shanghai’s local authorities, becoming the first international automaker that was given go-ahead to carry out autonomous vehicle road tests.

In addition, BMW was also the first to demonstrate and publish L3 highly autonomous driving on a designated highway under government supervision in Chengdu as early as 2016.