BlackBerry To Enter Self-Driving Vehicle Market With Upcoming Technology

BlackBerry may have given up the smartphone-making battle, but it still wants its presence in the market to be felt by many consumers. In a new attempt at finding its place in the tech industry, the once-popular Canadian smartphone maker revealed that it is joining the self-driving vehicle market with its own driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technology.

VentureBeat has learned that BlackBerry is opening its autonomous driving research center in Canada this Monday. A spokeswoman has confirmed that BlackBerry’s subsidiary QNX’s Ottawa facility is expanding to include research and development of a more advanced technology for self-driving cars. Due to financial constraints, however, the company intends to just come up with the software foundation for other platforms and not really invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning like what Silicon Valley firms are doing.

“What QNX is doing is providing the infrastructure that allows you to build higher-level algorithms and to also acquire data from the sensors in a reliable manner,” QNX worker Sebastian Fischmeister said. Last Friday, QNX head John Wall also alluded to the same thing when he said that BlackBerry is focusing more on developing the software foundation for other compute platforms.

BlackBerry intends to use Ford Lincoln vehicles for its initial tests. The company has already made a deal with Ford to do so. Included in this deal is BlackBerry’s plan to provide an infotainment and security software that also packs in autonomous driving features. To make this work, the Ford Lincoln vehicles have been retrofitted with self-driving hardware and software, as per TechCrunch. Other details of the testing have yet to be revealed by both parties.

BlackBerry is expected to join a tight market even at the software level, especially now that chipmakers Qualcomm, Intel and Nvidia are also planning to develop their own software to boost the sales of their hardware business. Nevertheless, Auto Forecast Solutions analyst Sam Fiorani said, “If they can prove that they have the whole package and the security, they could absolutely dominate the market,” as quoted by Fortune.