The Japanese government and the European Union plan to connect their global positioning systems to speed up the development of autonomous driving technology. The Japanese government and the European Commission have launched discussions on integrating the systems. Among the companies taking part are Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi Zosen and NTT Data of Japan as well as Thales, a big defense and electronics company from France. The discussion group is to draft a specific plan by the end this year on integrating the two digital signals. Global navigation satellite systems such as GPS pinpoint locations on the ground. Japan and the EU plan to use location information from these systems to run driverless vehicles.