BlackBerry will deliver a major announcement at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) Jan. 15.
John Chen, BlackBerry executive chairman & CEO, will pull back the curtain during his keynote presentation in the Cobo Center’s Atrium in Detroit and unveil the company’s newest product for self-driving cars, according to a Dec. 7 press release.
This comes two months after BlackBerry’s announcement that Yanfeng Visteon, a global Tier 1 automotive supplier, selected their company’s safety-certified QNX Platform for Instrument Clusters 1.0 software.
Not long before that, Delphi Automotive PLC announced it had signed a commercial partnership with BlackBerry Ltd. to provide the operating system for its autonomous driving system.
“Cybersecurity is a topic of extreme importance as the vehicles of tomorrow become more and more connected,” Ryan LaFontaine, 2018 NAIAS Chairman, said in the press release.
Chen’s keynote, which will begin at 2:10 p.m., will focus heavily on BlackBerry’s emphasis on cybersecurity solutions and its application in the automotive industry.
In an interview with Computer Dealer News back in March, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard emphasized BlackBerry’s goal to use its embedded software expertise to help establish itself as a leader in developing automotive operating systems.
“We’re basically the market leader in car operating systems,” said Beard. “You as a user may see (your car radio) but the OS underneath is BlackBerry. Your car’s entire acoustic system, all of it, is BlackBerry.”
Ottawa and BlackBerry partnered up in October to test Canada’s first self-driving vehicle on a public road.
The Dec. 7 press release also highlights BlackBerry’s new strategic collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, to develop automotive platforms for the next generation of connected vehicles.