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#MoveSafety Hackathon: Mercedes-Benz introduces #MoveSafety initiative to bring more safety to mobility


Potsdam/Germany – WEBWIRE
  • With a two-day hackathon, the #MoveSafety initiative started in Potsdam, Germany.
  • Hackathon aimed to adapt a contextual application, already used on the Chinese market, helping users to move around safely.
  • Event hosted 30 developers from Mercedes-Benz and the official hackathon partners ARAG, Deutsche Telekom, MBition, Daimler TSS and XU Exponential University of Applied Sciences.
  • New app is planned to serve customers on the German, Indian and Mexican markets.
  • Pilot projects for the implementation will start in February, 2020.
  • Final code will be published on GitHub free to use by developers.


With a two-day hackathon, Mercedes-Benz started the brand’s #MoveSafety initiative which in a first step focusses on creating a contextual application helping users to get where they want to be, as safely as possible. The new app will be based on “Tuban Xiong”, an app which has already been successfully introduced to the Chinese market by Mercedes-Benz in 2018 and offers several functions especially aiming at increasing travel safety such as: Location Sharing, Trip Sharing, SOS-Call, Geo-Fencing, Bodyguard Service, Fake Call etc. The main users are women in the big metropolitan areas of China. And within the target group, the app has already proved its worth: it received a five-star rating in the app-store.

“The safety of our customers has always played a major role in our history – it’s an integral part of our company DNA. We continuously innovate solutions which increase the safety of mobility for our customers in all areas of their daily life. Therefore, I am very excited to see how our #MoveSafety aims to increase people’s lives even further.” – Britta Seeger, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, Mercedes-Benz Cars Marketing & Sales.

The new initiative started with a hackathon which took place on December, 10th-11th, 2019, on the Campus of XU Exponential University in Potsdam, Germany, in order to adapt the “Tuban Xiong” app to the requirements of the German market. 30 developers from Mercedes-Benz and its hackathon partners - ARAG, Deutsche Telekom, MBition, Daimler TSS, and XU Exponential University - participated in the event. Five teams created five completely new and different ideas. All ideas were finally presented to a jury and were rated along five criteria: “innovation & demand“, ”design & functionality“, “sustainability“, “product scalability“ and „business model“. The winning team came from the partner ARAG, their app “Hero” convinced the four jury members the most in all five categories.

The #MoveSafety hackathon is exemplary of what Mercedes-Benz stands for: A star built on trust and safety. It brings Mercedes-Benz one step further towards shaping the future of safe and secure mobility for everybody, world-wide.

“#MoveSafety is a perfect example of code that goes around the world, as we will successively localize and adapt the original Chinese product to suit the German, Indian and Mexican market according to the most relevant use cases.” – Sabine Scheunert, Vice President Digital & IT Sales/Marketing Mercedes-Benz Cars. “Therefore, we make use of Open Source collaboration as a pillar of our #TwiceAsFast IT strategy to consequently speed up our IT development processes. I am happy to contribute to this vision together with my global team in our ambition to create the best or nothing digital customer experience“, she continued. 

In addition to the development of the German app, later in 2020 an Indian version of the app will be created based on the feedback from the pilot employee users of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India. A further pilot for the Mexican market is also planned for 2020.

A main goal behind this initiative is to offer IT-products as Open Source code to make them accessible to different kinds of institutions and adaptable to various use cases. Mercedes-Benz will invite additional partners from the Economy, Academia and NGOs to join this initiative. Please go to Mercedes-Benz /developers (https://developer.mercedes-benz.com/news) to join the #MoveSafety initiative.


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