Toyota, Intel and others form big data group for automotive tech

A collection of prominent names in the tech industry have teamed up with Toyota to work on developing big data systems to support self-driving cars and other future automotive advances.

Denso, Ericsson, Intel and NTT Docomo joined hands with the Japanese car giant to announce the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium today. The group said it has plans to add “relevant global technology leaders” to its membership this year.

The companies have come together to tackle concerns around data usage in connected cars of the future, a critical component to making real-time mapping, driving assistance and other services go from theory to working in practice. Handling the huge volumes of data in a reliable and secure manner is critical.

“It is estimated that the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes per month around 2025, approximately 10,000 times larger than the present volume. This expected increase will trigger the need for new architectures of network and computing infrastructure to support distributed resources and topology-aware storage capacity,” the group said in a statement.

To give an idea of scale, 10 exabytes is 10 billion gigabytes — a lot of data indeed.

Toyota has been pretty busy in the connected car space, to say the least. Last week, it took a stake in Mazda to advance its AI and autonomous tech push, and other notable advancements this year have included a connected car partnership with NTT, a move into the blockchain, and a $100 million fund to invest in AI startups.