If you want to know the end game in connected car technology, follow the money. And that means following the data. A 2013 study by IHS Automotive predicted that “connected car systems will yield approximately $14.5 billion in revenue from automotive data … by 2020.” This cash will come from “Big Data assets found in the connected car—diagnostics, location, user experience/feature tracking, and adaptive driver assistance systems/autonomy,” a press release on the study said.
While this projected connected car payoff is only five years away, for now automakers are struggling just to provide infotainment that doesn’t frustrate car owners. And to get to that point, they are now partnering with Apple and Google on CarPlay and Android Auto, respectively, to in essence make a vehicle’s in-dash display a dumb terminal for the tech companies’ portable devices.
Apple and Google aren’t new to the car. iPod integration became a de facto term for connecting almost any music player to a car years ago, and more recently Google has been supplying navigation mapping and local search capability to automakers. But with CarPlay and Android Auto, Apple and Google will have more access to data from drivers and vehicles than ever before. Each time drivers search for navigation destinations using one of the platforms, for example, valuable data about where they are, where they’re going, and what they’re looking for is generated.
While this data is lucrative when the user is standing still, it’s worth a lot more in the car. When people are out driving, they’re likely on their way to purchase something, or at least to stop off at, say, a Starbucks for a coffee. This data on their location, intentions, and preferences is gold to marketers and money to anyone that can harvest, analyze, and process it.
While Apple CarPlay and Google Android Auto are expected to roll out soon in new cars, executives at two of the top European automakers are urging the industry to put the brakes on giving data to third parties. Last week at a conference in Munich, the CEOs of Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz called for automakers to establish platforms and protocols for limiting the vehicle data shared with Google, Apple, and others.
“We seek connection to Google’s data systems, but we still want to be the masters of our own cars,” VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn said at the conference during a discussion that also included Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Mercedes Benz’s parent company Daimler. “Potential conflict arises around making data available.”
Zetsche added that “it’s very good” that the auto industry is developing ways to process and store vehicle data so it doesn’t rely on third parties. “That’ll boost our position when working with Google. Google tries to accompany people throughout their day, to generate data and then use that data for economic gain,” he said. “It’s at that point where a conflict with Google seems pre-programmed. That’s where we need to negotiate.”
But as we’ve seen with infotainment, maybe it’s better that companies like Google handle connected car data. From Ford allowing Microsoft to create an infotainment platform for its cars via Sync, to brand-name premium audio way before that, outsourcing technology has been successful for automakers and beneficial to car buyers.
It could be argued that a company with expertise in data like Google could provide more value than a car company. After all, the reason people are willing to give up personal data by using Google products like Local Search and Maps is they realize a benefit from it.
Some would argue that neither automakers nor tech companies like Google should have access to a car’s or a driver’s data, and that it belongs to the vehicle owner. That’s now possible with OBD-II data readers like Automatic and Zubie. But then these two devices work with Apple iOS and Google Android apps to capture information such as location, speed, and fuel efficiency, although a driver can at least download and use their own data.
And while the devices are marketed as a way to monitor driving and potentially save on repairs and on fuel, someday owners may be able to decide how they want their data used—whether it’s taken from automaker’s embedded systems, a connected portable device, or with an aftermarket add-on. And perhaps not just follow the money, but reap rewards that results from the use of it.
