BMW Group is expanding collection of image data from BMW customer vehicles in Europe to drive continuous product improvement and enhance road safety.

Munich. With the BMW Group’s new generation of driver-assistance and active safety systems, the new BMW iX3 offers a high level of comfort and added safety for its drivers. These systems also protect pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users.

In addition to extensive virtual testing using simulations and physical validation with the fleet of BMW development vehicles, image data from real-world traffic situations from customer vehicles can provide significant added value for the continuous improvement and further development of driver-assistance systems. Since April 2026, the BMW Group can collect such image data in EU member states from vehicles of the new model generation, which are equipped with the necessary sensor technology and data processing architecture for situational capture of environmental video data. These include the new BMW iX3 and i3, X5, and 7 Series, as well as subsequent new models and model updates. The use of this image data is contingent upon customers’ consent and is carried out in compliance with all data protection regulations. Thanks to BMW software updates, customers and road users will benefit from over-the-air system improvements that can be implemented in the future using the image data collected from real-world traffic situations.

Compliance with applicable data protection regulations is a top priority throughout the entire data collection and use process. The BMW Group provides information on this topic on a new website featuring the relevant privacy notices.

Event-based data collection only in relesvant driving situations.
Data collection for the further development of driver assistance functions focuses exclusively on specific traffic situations in which these systems can be particularly beneficial. These include, for example, collisions prevented by assistance systems during lane changes on the highway, the activation of the emergency braking assistant, heavy manual braking, or a sudden evasive maneuver by the driver. Only sensor and image data that is relevant to understanding the situation and further optimizing driver assistance systems is specifically collected. This includes images of the vehicle’s surroundings captured by the exterior cameras, data from the environmental sensors, and driving dynamics information such as speed, direction of travel, or steering angle.

For this purpose, event-based video data may be collected from the vehicles (limited to a maximum of 120 seconds per event) in unaltered form starting mid-September. The BMW Group has implemented “privacy-by-design” measures for data processing. Before the data is used, the vehicle identification number is deleted immediately after transmission to the BMW IT backend, so that it is no longer possible to link the data to a specific vehicle. Under no circumstances do BMW systems identify individual road users. Unaltered image data is used to further develop driver assistance systems and semi-automated driving functions through machine learning.

If authorized BMW employees need to access individual recordings for development purposes, faces or license plates of other road users contained in the image data are obscured prior to playback to the extent technically possible. The handling of data collected for this purpose is carried out in compliance with all applicable data protection requirements.