Socar and Apex Mobility are moving into a business to commercialise driving data itself. Socar and Apex Mobility will take part in the '2026 Autonomous Driving Mobility Industry Expo' to be held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, from Aug. 25 to 27 and will push their autonomous driving data business in earnest, they said on Aug. 24.

In May, Socar set up Apex Mobility, an autonomous driving joint venture with total capital of 150 billion won. Apex Mobility plans to expand in stages, starting with building a data pipeline and a supply business and later extending to an autonomous driving-based robotaxi ride-hailing service.

The two companies will process real-world driving and accident-related data accumulated over the past 15 years into a form that can be used for training. They will support immediate use by autonomous driving companies at home and abroad, automakers and research institutions. The exhibition space will be operated as a venue to show data competitiveness and as a consultation window for the data business. Presenting data itself as a product, rather than vehicles or sensors, is the first case among domestic autonomous driving exhibitions.

Socar operates about 25,000 car-sharing vehicles nationwide as connected cars. Driving video and more than 100 types of vehicle data, including GPS and steering angle, are collected in real time through two-channel dashcams and telematics devices. Combined, Socar vehicles travel about 1.1 million km per day, which is 10 times South Korea's total road length of 110,000 km. The company explained that this makes it possible to secure all public road conditions 24 hours a day and in all four seasons.

Socar has a strength in so-called edge-case data, exceptional driving situation data that determines the reliability of autonomous driving artificial intelligence. It has accumulated more than 40,000 accident videos a year and has built up about 220,000 cases in total of so-called egomotion data, in which a moving self-driving vehicle estimates its own three-dimensional movement. The raw data gathered this way are processed at Apex Mobility into an international standard format through anonymisation and automatic labelling.

Apex Mobility will also unveil for the first time at the exhibition a prototype vehicle for its own data collection. It is an Ioniq 5 equipped with lidar and seven multi-view cameras. Socar can accumulate data in real time without separate collection vehicles or dedicated drivers, and Apex Mobility can choose collection region and period, vehicle type and scenario on a customised basis to produce training data on a made-to-order basis.

Jae-wook Park (박재욱), chief executive of Socar and Apex Mobility, said, "In the era of E2E autonomous driving where AI makes direct judgments, what decides the outcome is the quantity and quality of data from real roads." He said, "We have a real-time large-scale data pipeline that no mobility platform in Korea can match, so we plan to begin discussions in earnest with companies at home and abroad on supplying autonomous driving data."