“TomTom Automotive will play a key role in ADAS and autonomous driving”. George de Boer, Global Director Marketing
Things are moving within Dutch traffic, navigation and mapping company TomTom. It is selling its telematics division to tyre manufacturer Bridgestone to focus on location technologies, including innovative mapping and navigation systems designed for autonomous cars.
That also means new challenges for George de Boer, former Leader of Connected Car Initiatives at TomTom Telematics: on March 1st, 2019 he was appointed Global Director Marketing of Automotive at TomTom.
“The challenge in my new job is to tell the world which role TomTom plays in today’s Automotive industry. In my first week we announced a lot of news at the Geneva Motor show 2019 that perfectly illustrate that important role,” George told Fleet Europe.
“First of all, today we are powering a lot of the connected navigation technology - maps, software and services - in a wide variety of cars. It is in traditional cars with e.g. the real time traffic information we provide to VW Group vehicles, but also the electric vehicles from Nissan and Jeep that use our special EV content and algorithms in the navigation software to get rid of the fear of running out of battery power.”
“For the cars of tomorrow, we develop the driver assist (ADAS) features to make driving less stressful but more importantly safer, like the first ADASIS v3 compatible virtual horizon that we created with Elektrobit.”
“In parallel, TomTom works with the top researchers of OEMs and Tier1s to power the cars of ‘the day after tomorrow’ on our journey to autonomous driving. Currently we hold the market leadership in powering automated vehicles with our HD mapping technology,” George concludes.
About George de Boer
A graduate in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, George started his career at CGI managing complex IT infrastructure projects. He joined TomTom in 2006, undertaking a variety of roles and projects, applying his knowledge in helping develop and market accurate real time and historical traffic solutions and live maps.
Having been named International Alliance Manager in 2013, George set up TomTom Telematics’ partner eco-system – currently the largest in the industry - supporting integration with the TomTom Telematics open platform and encouraging joint commercial activities.
Since 2016 George was responsible for managing and marketing the innovation around the new Connected Car developments as Leader of Connected Car Initiatives.
