Photo: BlackBerry
After Apple’s CEO Tim Cook neither confirmed nor denied if his company was thinking to develop a car, now it’s BlackBerry CEO John Chen’s turn to reveal his company’s desire of entering the driverless cars market.
The Canadian company, mostly known for its smartphones, will present "advanced driver-assist technologies and solutions" at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2016.
BlackBerry already is a major player in the automotive market, where, through its QNX unit, it delivers infotainment systems to millions of cars. Last year, BlackBerry scored a major hit when Ford replaced its Windows Embedded with QNX to power its Sync 3 connected car platform.
Recently, the Waterloo-based company teamed up with Luxoft to work on semi-autonomous driving technologies. Luxoft’s technology, called CVNAR, can be adapted to an automaker’s custom specifications, sold as a ready-to-use solution or offered as a hardware-independent solution for head-up displays, LCDs or AR glasses.
Currently, a lot of carmakers are using semi-autonomous systems in their vehicles, to give them the ability to automatically change lanes or brake, but the fully-autonomous cars is where everyone wants to guide their companies next.
According to Bloomberg, Chen expressed his desire to collaborate with companies such as Google, Apple or Tesla because BlackBerry’s software platform works with Google or Apple’s car strategy.
About this next step his company is going to take, John Chen stated that “our software is currently in 60 million cars running around, so it’s obvious, natural for us to step into the next generation of automobiles.”
It is a well-known fact that the company’s CEO has shifted BlackBerry’s attention to security software because its smartphone branch is not doing so well. This has been easy to notice recently, when BlackBerry reported a narrower third-quarter loss, not because of its software division but because the company sold 100,000 smartphones less than in the previous quarter, and the number is still dropping.
BlackBerry already is a major player in the automotive market, where, through its QNX unit, it delivers infotainment systems to millions of cars. Last year, BlackBerry scored a major hit when Ford replaced its Windows Embedded with QNX to power its Sync 3 connected car platform.
Recently, the Waterloo-based company teamed up with Luxoft to work on semi-autonomous driving technologies. Luxoft’s technology, called CVNAR, can be adapted to an automaker’s custom specifications, sold as a ready-to-use solution or offered as a hardware-independent solution for head-up displays, LCDs or AR glasses.
Currently, a lot of carmakers are using semi-autonomous systems in their vehicles, to give them the ability to automatically change lanes or brake, but the fully-autonomous cars is where everyone wants to guide their companies next.
According to Bloomberg, Chen expressed his desire to collaborate with companies such as Google, Apple or Tesla because BlackBerry’s software platform works with Google or Apple’s car strategy.
About this next step his company is going to take, John Chen stated that “our software is currently in 60 million cars running around, so it’s obvious, natural for us to step into the next generation of automobiles.”
It is a well-known fact that the company’s CEO has shifted BlackBerry’s attention to security software because its smartphone branch is not doing so well. This has been easy to notice recently, when BlackBerry reported a narrower third-quarter loss, not because of its software division but because the company sold 100,000 smartphones less than in the previous quarter, and the number is still dropping.
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