SOCAR and APEX Mobility are set to ramp up their Autonomous Driving data business. Their goal is to process real-world driving and accident-related data accumulated over the past 15 years into a trainable format so Autonomous Driving corporations and automakers, as well as research institutions at home and abroad, can use it immediately.
SOCAR and APEX Mobility said on the 24th that they will participate in the Autonomous Driving Mobility Industry Exhibition 2026 (AME 2026), to be held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, from the 25th to the 27th, to introduce their Autonomous Driving data business.
The two companies will set up an exhibition space under the theme of "Korea's largest Autonomous Driving data platform." A SOCAR official said, "As Autonomous Driving technology shifts from a rule-based approach grounded in high-resolution HD maps to an end-to-end (E2E) method that processes multi-modal data—such as camera footage and LiDAR—through a single artificial intelligence (AI) model, we aim to show the trend in which the decisive factor for technological completion has moved to the data itself."
All of the approximately 25,000 car-sharing vehicles SOCAR operates nationwide are connected cars, and more than about 100 types of vehicle data—such as black box driving footage, global positioning system (GPS) information, and steering angle—are collected in real time through front and rear dashcams and in-house telematics units. The combined daily driving distance of all SOCAR vehicles is about 1.1 million km, 10 times the total 110,000 km length of roads nationwide.
In particular, at this exhibition they plan to unveil for the first time a real prototype vehicle equipped with various sensors that allows APEX Mobility to independently collect high-quality Autonomous Driving data, in addition to data secured from SOCAR. The prototype Ioniq 5 to be showcased has seven cameras installed throughout the vehicle to secure omnidirectional high-resolution multi-view footage, including a LiDAR unit mounted on the roof.
Chief Executive Park Jae-uk of SOCAR and APEX Mobility said, "In the E2E Autonomous Driving era, where AI makes direct judgments, what decides the outcome is the quantity and quality of data from real roads," adding, "Based on a large-scale, real-time data pipeline, we plan to begin full-fledged discussions with domestic and international corporations on supplying Autonomous Driving data."
In May, SOCAR joined hands with Krafton to establish APEX Mobility, an Autonomous Driving joint venture worth 150 billion won in total. APEX Mobility plans to start with a cooperative business to build and supply an Autonomous Driving data pipeline and later push ahead with a robotaxi service based on Autonomous Driving technology.