GM, BMW Back Blockchain Data Sharing For Self-Driving Cars

Car giants General Motors and BMW are backing blockchain tech as a way to share self-driving car data among themselves and other automakers.  It’s all part of a bid to unlock valuable data held in silos which will ultimately get autonomous vehicles on the road sooner. Exploratory work in this area is being done under the auspices of the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), a consortium formed last year to harmonize the development of distributed ledger technology (DLT) across the car industry. CoinDesk has learned that the next MOBI working group on so-called autonomous vehicle data markets (AVDM) will be chaired by General Motors (GM). The automaker has clearly been thinking about using blockchain to share data for some time, having filed a patent detailing such a system for fleets of self-driving cars at the end of last year.The new AVDM working group chairman Michal Filipowski, manager global innovation of General Motors, told CoinDesk in an email:“I am excited to chair the AVDM working group and kickoff the development of our collaborative efforts with the other OEM [original equipment manufacturers] and supplier MOBI members.”And notably, BMW, a founding member of MOBI, has also expressed its interest in the data-sharing use case for the first time. (Previously BMW tested blockchain to track mileage of leased vehicles.