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.

CoinDesk has learned that the next MOBI working group on so-called autonomous vehicle data markets will be chaired by General Motors.

The automaker has clearly been thinking about using blockchain to share data for some time, having filed a paten.

"With the advent of blockchain, decentral[ized] data management can be implemented in a privacy-preserving and efficient way," Andre Luckow, blockchain lead at BMW Group, told CoinDesk.

"Further, emerging technologies, such as decentral machine learning, secure multi-party confidential computing, and decentral data markets, will provide the fabric for data processing in the autonomous age."

Stepping back, the push to foster autonomous vehicles faces a key hurdle: the sheer volume of data self-driving cars must consume in order to "Learn" how to drive in different places and scenarios.

"The old fashioned way is that everybody thinks their data is so precious. The new way is data are like cooking ingredients. Data marketplaces call technically for blockchain because you can create an environment when rules are clear in terms of who shares what data."

Another MOBI member, Ocean Protocol, is focused on the creating blockchain-based data markets and running a shared AI on them.

Ocean co-founder Trent McConaghy is aiming to create a kind of enterprise data commons where everyone can benefit, yet at the same time, this data can be prevented from escaping beyond the firewalls of any one company.

Michael Ortmeier of BMW Group IT communications said Ocean's approach to data sharing is one the company is "Following with great interest."