On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Audi, BMW, and Daimler “have agreed in principle” to buy Nokia's digital mapping service Here. Apparently, Nokia has been in exclusive negotiations with the three automakers who will buy the entirety of Here for just over $2.71 billion.

A person with knowledge of the deal told the Journal that once the three automakers buy Here, they will “invite other global auto makers to take stakes in the company,” with the aim of running “the service as an open platform for everyone.”

Nokia currently licenses Here data to Samsung and Microsoft, as well as Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Amazon Maps, and Garmin GPS devices. (The Journal notes that Here currently works with about 80 percent of auto industry customers as well, beating out Google, which is developing its own high-profile line of autonomous cars, and Dutch mapping service TomTom.) The mapping data is seen as critical to automakers in the coming years, as self-driving cars become licensed for use on city streets.

According to the Journal, the three automakers could officially sign the deal in the next few days. They beat out bidders such as Uber and other private equity investors.

Here is a good buy for automakers looking to get into autonomous vehicles because the service has been working on building an autonomous-vehicle-readable map system for some time now. While map apps that people use to navigate city streets are generally sufficient for that purpose, self-driving cars require significantly more data about the world around them. Here's head of Automotive Cloud Services, Vladimir Boroditsky, told Ars in October that Here had already begun sending out sensor-equipped cars to build machine-readable maps that it updates in near-realtime.