What to watch at the Paris Motor Show: insights from HERE's CCO

“More affordable electric cars are finally arriving, and they’re aimed at everyday drivers, not just early adopters,” said Jameson.  

That shift is also bringing more Chinese brands to Europe, with Geely, Zeekr, BYD and Leapmotor among those launching new electric and hybrid models. For car buyers, that means more choice and more competition. 

And while EVs are becoming more accessible, Jameson expects hybrids to remain part of the mix for some time. “Hybrids will stick around longer than some people expected,” he said. 

With some EU emissions rules reportedly being eased, plug-in hybrids and range extenders give carmakers a way to hit their targets while easing the worry many drivers still have about running out of charge on the road.  

EV does it 

Once the battery and motor in electric vehicles (EVs) become standard parts that every carmaker can get, what sets one EV apart from another will be the digital, AI-powered cockpit.  

At the heart of that is location awareness, which powers connected cars, software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and in-car AI assistants that need up-to-the-minute data to work. 

But all that awareness only matters if drivers trust it. To hand over control to a self-driving car, you need to see for yourself what it understands about the road around you. Without that openness, even the smartest system will have a hard time winning people over. 

"HERE is the location layer behind much of what drivers already experience without realizing it," said Jameson, pointing to everyday things like navigation, lane-level guidance, finding EV charging stations and real-time traffic.  

“Nobody buys a car because of the map underneath it,” he said. “But comfort, safety and innovation all rely on getting people where they need to go safely and efficiently. That's where HERE comes in.” 

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Sense of direction 

Jameson sees AI as the hottest topic heading into Paris, and that HERE's job is to connect it to the real world.  

As cars run more and more on software and AI, he said, carmakers need a source of location data they can trust, so their systems actually understand the road around them. "Maps need to behave less like static products and more like living ones," he said. "Continually refreshed to reflect changing road networks, speed limits and conditions." 

Take a driver who asks the car to find an EV charger near a coffee shop on their route. To pull that off, the car has to weigh how much range is left, how big a detour it is, whether the charger is free and what's nearby, all based on an accurate picture of the road network and what's happening on it right now. "AI understands intent," said Jameson. "And location intelligence helps it act on that intent reliably." 

Beyond in-car assistants, Jameson observed, AI continues to grow across the automotive value chain, from driver-assistance systems and personalized user experiences to vehicle engineering and development. 

Read more—Software-defined vehicles: moving up the maturity framework

In the fast lane 

Jameson said the choices carmakers make today about their tech setup will still matter long after any single car model is gone, especially as cars become software-defined vehicles, where much of what the car does is run by software. Those choices reach across chipmakers, operating system providers and core services like navigation and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).  

HERE's answer has been to team up with AWS on an SDV Accelerator program. It pre-connects the key pieces of that setup so carmakers can get cars to market faster and keep the software inside the dashboard simpler. As the industry matures, Jameson expects more teamwork with leading providers of automotive computing, chip and software platforms. 

Miles ahead 

HERE's location platform is already at work in more than 238 million vehicles around the world. Of those, more than 63 million count on HERE data to run driver-assistance and automated driving features. HERE Navigation alone is set to ship in more than two million vehicles across 30 countries.  

Looking ahead, the company wants its location technology in every moving vehicle, a goal Jameson said should get a boost from better connectivity and new rules around intelligent speed assistance (ISA), which helps cars keep to the speed limit. 

Where the road leads next 

Heading into Paris, Jameson said he's most curious to see how carmakers are doing with digital branding, meaning the in-car experience that now puts them up against phone makers for a driver's attention. He pointed to HERE's own AI assistant as proof of what's possible. Ask it for a scenic drive from Zurich to Nice with an Italian lunch stop near the top of a mountain pass, and it can come back with a personalized route in seconds. 

Looking back at how far AI has come in such a short time, Jameson said the speed of progress still catches him off guard, especially how fast an idea can now turn into working software. 

"After all," said Jameson. "Technology is only limited by our ideas."