Mercedes using What3words geocoding system

Mercedes-Benz has announced a new navigation feature is coming to its cars next year, one that’s designed to help drivers find their way to very precise points on the planet that are difficult to find through conventional directions.

While many of the places you’ll ever want to visit are easy to find through a quick keyword or postal-code search on Google Maps, there are plenty of points on Earth that aren’t quite so simple to describe when it comes to giving directions. That cool beach hut you hired for the week? That temporary bivouac you set up while on a hill-walking holiday? A decaying shipwreck? Or what about the many expansive countries that don’t have a reliable addressing system or up-to-date maps with every town, street, and house accounted for?

This is one problem that London-based What3words has been tackling over the past four years, having developed a global addressing system that uses just three words to describe very precise locations.

Available in 14 languages, the company’s platform divides the entire globe into 57 trillion 3 meter x 3 meter squares, assigning each square a random three-word address — these words could represent a buoy in the Atlantic Ocean or a shack in the middle of the Gobi desert. Through its mobile app, you can drag the little pin across the map and you’re given the three word address for a place — for example, “departed.rumbled.awaiting” is the address of this random point in the Gobi desert.

Read the full article in VentureBeat here.