A deal between BMW Group and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will help triple the amount of connected car data pulled into the cloud from the German automaker’s vehicles.

AWS and the BMW Group announced the strategic collaboration to develop customizable cloud software focused on the distribution and management of data from millions of connected vehicles. The BMW Group will be the first automaker to use the software, which will serve as the basis for its next-generation, cloud-based vehicle data platform.

Moving forward, the new software will be available to other automakers, enabling them to integrate vehicle data sources, accelerate vehicle and fleet application feature development.

For the automotive aftermarket, the implications for executing effective repairs without access to this rapidly increasing quantity of data as pertains to service information is at the root of the drive for Right to Repair legislation. As the number of connected cars increases, say legislative proponents, existing voluntary agreements forged before connected car technology existed become less effective.

“We have 20 million connected vehicles on the road today. With the launch of the ‘Neue Klasse,’ BMW’s next generation of vehicles, our offboard cloud platform, powered by AWS, will process roughly triple the volume of vehicle data compared to the current generation of BMW models,” said Nicolai Krämer, vice president of Vehicle Connectivity Platforms at the BMW Group.

The BMW Group and AWS co-developed solution collects BMW vehicle signals and fleet intelligence data, then securely processes and routes the data in the cloud. Using AWS’s cloud infrastructure and its industry-leading security, the BMW Group ensures that its customer data is protected and processed in accordance with data privacy requirements and customer preferences.

Only the BMW Group’s internal domain experts—vehicle application developers, fleet managers, data scientists, and artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and development engineers—gain access to the data via a self-service mechanism that gathers streaming vehicle data, easily adds new data sources, configures access in accordance with governance policies, and monitors the quality and health of streaming sources.

The data is then combined with AWS capabilities, including analytics, machine learning, database, storage, and compute, enabling the BMW Group experts to create new vehicle features and applications.

“Rapid, data-fueled innovation is critical to unlocking next-generation vehicle capabilities for automotive organizations, particularly as the industry looks to expand electric vehicle adoption, software-defined vehicle development, new digital service paradigms, and more autonomous vehicle features,” said Sarah Cooper, general manager of AWS Industry Products at Amazon Web Services, Inc.

The BMW Group is the first to benefit from this jointly developed AWS software that will be part of the AWS for Automotive offering, delivering the technology automakers need to build the next generation of software-centric platforms.

AWS says the software will help other automakers offer add-on features like electric vehicle range improvements or performance upgrades for a weekend off-road, and it will help fleet managers develop responsive, vehicle-aware applications. These next-generation platforms enable automakers to develop centralized, high-performance computing capabilities, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) software development throughout the vehicle life cycle, near real-time data management, and machine learning for autonomous vehicles.

But they can also form the basis for barriers to repair information for the automotive aftermarket if automakers use this structure as a lockout for independent repair outlets.

Right to Repair legislation to ensure access is currently being considered in Canada as well as the U.S. federally, and in the U.S. a number of state initiatives are in play.

To learn more, visit www.aws.com/automotive.

For information on Right to Repair in Canada, visit RighttoRepair.ca

For information on Right to Repair in the U.S. visit AutoCare.org