ATX has announced that the French Interior Ministry has given it and BMW France certification to provide ATX's emergency notification and response, or eCall, service. The service is said to be standard in most models of BMW in France.

ATX is a provider of customized telematics services to global automobile manufacturers.

ATX says it also customizes telematics services to help automobile manufacturers like BMW and its affiliated dealerships to use telematics data to reduce costs, enhance vehicle servicing, and more closely manage customer relationships.

According to ATX, its menu of Telematics services includes monitoring and verifying location-based eCalls from vehicles, including advanced automatic collision notification, which provides emergency responders with crash severity information aggregated from various in-vehicle sensors along with vehicle location (via satellite positioning), vehicle description, direction of travel, and a voice connection into the vehicle.

Originally introduced in Germany, ATX says that it has assisted BMW in recent years in expanding the coverage area of its location-based, in-vehicle emergency notification service to include not only France, but also Italy, the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Monaco.

The Advanced eCall system built inside the BMW vehicle can take into account various amounts of data and deduce the type of collision the vehicle has suffered and the resulting probability of injury to the vehicle’s passengers. The deployment status of all the various restraint systems in the vehicle is ascertained, along with seat occupancy and seatbelt status for the front seats.

BMW has started its own call center to receive the status-of-the-vehicle sent from the telematics systems and that data is processed using a special algorithm jointly developed by the BMW accident research team and the WLIRC.

The incoming vehicle data, interpreted using the algorithm, provides a detailed picture of the accident situation. Based on this, a message containing the accident location and vehicle data is sent by the BMW call center to the relevant emergency services, which can then launch an efficient, appropriate and immediate rescue operation.

ATX recently started new Toyota/Lexus Safety Connect program and introduced in-vehicle, hands-free text messaging using voice commands.