A step towards autonomous driving? Ericsson, Volvo Cars sign 5-year global deal

Ericsson has been selected by Volvo Car Group to provide the industrialised Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloud (CVC) platform to further enable its digital vehicle services in more than 120 markets worldwide for the next five years. Volvo Cars, like other major players in the automotive industry, is increasing focus on securing high-quality connected-vehicle services as digitalisation increases the importance of software services.

The services will also benefit from the increased speed, low-latency and capacity for mission critical applications, such as autonomous driving, that commercial 5G networks will enable.

The deal—which will enable Volvo Cars to provide car owners and drivers with its latest developments in connected car digital services such as automation, fleet management, telematics, navigation and infotainment—is the largest to date for Ericsson CVC.

The company said that delivered via several geographically distributed centres, the platform takes full account of legal, security, and privacy obligations on a global scale—such as compliance with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“With digital services increasingly becoming a differentiation factor for automotive consumers, the need for a secure and dependable service provision infrastructure is critical to provide quality of service at scale,” Ericsson said in a statement, adding, “This is what Ericsson CVC delivers—meeting Volvo Cars’ high services and applications availability and stability expectations, and allowing Volvo Cars to focus on the value creation of connected vehicle digital customer experiences as a differentiator.”

Asa Tamsons, Head of Business Area Technologies & New Businesses, Ericsson, said, “Ericsson is providing a highly scalable and global platform for connected services to Volvo Cars. By removing complexity in areas such as data legislation and storage management, and improving services latency, our platform enhances the overall user experience of Volvo Cars’ connected services.” He added that Ericsson CVC platform will result in rapid innovation and faster launch of new services to the benefit of Volvo Cars’ partners and customers.

Volvo India