Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform Grab has improved the accuracy of fare estimations, ETAs and trip routing for its more than 60 million passengers through an expanded partnership with global map data and location services provider, HERE Technologies.
Grab drivers and passengers now benefit from some of the region’s most accurate and fresh map content, thanks to HERE’s ongoing mission to create the most up to date three-dimensional representation of the physical world. The cloud-based map, which sees a fleet of HERE True vehicles continuously map the road network down to 2 cm accuracy, supports driver safety through automated car features and connected Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS).
Jerald Singh, Head of Product at Grab said: “We are increasingly becoming an active contributor to solving Southeast Asia’s long-term and fundamental issues: congestion, jobs, access to the digital economy, and HERE is helping us to achieve that goal as one of our core mapping and location data partners.”
“Southeast Asia is developing quickly, with new roads and new rules emerging every day. By layering local map data on top of HERE’s comprehensive location data, we can optimise driver-passenger interactions and further streamline our backend dispatch systems.”
The partnership will see HERE provide location services in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, which Grab will combine with real-world on-road data sourced from its 1.3 million drivers – Southeast Asia’s largest land transport fleet.
HERE will also provide its extensive Places of Interest (POIs) database gathered through public sector and enterprise partners such as Samsung, Amazon and Microsoft, and as well as real-time traffic data sourced from connected vehicles and devices.
The data-sharing partnership will overcome the challenges of operating in rapidly developing countries, such as Myanmar and the Philippines, which have no established national address system. For example, HERE has almost completed a two year 45,000km mission to create the first ever comprehensive digital map of the Philippine road network.
HERE’s APAC Director, Mark Whitmore said: “We’re proud to support Grab’s fast evolving platform and growing network of passengers, drivers and new service lines with our robust and flexible on-demand location platform.”
“We look forward to helping Grab streamline pick-up and drop-off processes, provide reliable ETAs and ultimately improve traffic management in underserviced cities like Yangon. The capacity for innovation through this partnership is extensive.”
HERE’s true vehicle cameras and LiDAR technology capture over 500 different attributes such as road geometry, speed limits and road signs to create a high definition machine readable 3D map down to two-centimeter accuracy.
HERE’s Matrix API forms the foundation of the collaboration, enabling Grab to improve the way drivers are assigned to passengers. In addition, HERE’s Basic Routing API provides ride hailers with more reliable ETAs and corresponding fare estimations.
