BMW Digital Key

2018: Announcement of BMW Digital Key

On February 26, 2018 at the Mobile World Congress 2018 exhibition in Barcelona the BMW company showed a possibility of blocking and an unblocking of cars using smartphones which in fact replace traditional charms and keys.

The digital BMW Digital Key key will become available to owners of the BMW cars in July, 2018 when the application is finally finished, but to use new technology, they also need the Samsung smartphone with the NFC chip used still mainly for payment transactions. The digital key is capable to unblock car doors through the BMW Connected application. Besides, using the smartphone it is possible even to start the engine — for this purpose to install a telephone on the wireless charging platform in the car enough.

BMW Digital Key replaces keys in cars with smartphones

The copy of a digital key can be provided to five more people to whom the owner trusts driving. For this purpose they also need the Samsung smartphone. It is supposed what after BMW will add other digital services to the cars.

Besides, BMW along with other large automobile companies, such as Audi, Continental, Gemalto, LG Electronics, NXP Semiconductors, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung and Volkswagen – only 75 companies – took part in development of the preliminary version of the Digital Key specification. Directly the Car Connectivity Consortium organization is engaged in the project.

Developments are the cornerstone commercially available solutions allowing to use smartphones, the smartwatch or other similar devices as car keys. Creation of the standard is intended to unify approaches and to provide compatibility of products of different producers. Unlike corporate products which scope is limited the standardized solutions will be more universal and will be able to form a single system on the scale of all industry.^[1]

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