Connected Car & Vehicle Data Cloud

Owning a car is quite stressful experience. Yes, driving is stressful, unless you are driving on a rural highway in open car with no police in sight :). Car ownership requires so much time, not to mention the money. To own a car today, you must go through routine maintenance, unplanned maintenance, yearly inspections, registration, taxes, accident repairs, towing, flat tire, windshield mishaps, battery problems, losing keys, forgetting to fuel / charge, cleaning, insurance, selling and buying, and may be few others that I can’t keep track of. These are individual events requiring reminders, time, money, brain cells, and sometimes fight with your better half about who is getting the damn car fixed. All this for a car that one drives about 2 hours a day.

Effectively, car care is completely disorganized, disconnected and bad experience. Here is my stress level breakdown of owning a car. Others might have different feelings about it.

Connected car is a silver lining that, if used effectively as an ecosystem, promises to improve this dramatically.

Let’s imagine an ecosystem with car at the center of “Vehicle Data Cloud”, where VDC is either managed by OEM /a consortium of OEMs / TaaS (Transportation as a Service) / or some such entity. I would argue that an OEM would like to control the VDC, so it has control of the data, which it can use for all kinds of improvements for its vehicle.

Ben Evans makes a great point here about how data will be crucial for creating network effects. Though his context is autonomy, I think it equally applies to connected car platforms.

There are signs of such ecosystems developing all over including Uber / Lyft, and some insurance carriers assembling pieces of this as well, but the experience for the end consumer is still quite fragmented.

Here is one view how a connected car ecosystem with VDC might play out.

Building VDC on top of Blockchain could keep the cloud inherently secure, perhaps even meeting some of the strict standards of privacy. Blockchain based solution should also make it easy for different entities to have complete control of their data. For example, the driver can have complete control of his profile, as well as fine grained access authorization for service providers of his choosing, while OEM can share vehicle data with similar controls with different services.

Imagine car emitting continuous signals — location / diagnostics / behavior / crash pulse — which gets stored on VDC, shared with authorized entities. If VDC is an open platform, it would allow different service providers to innovate on it, and enhance the overall experience for the driver. For example, while OEM can innovate in predictive and analytical modeling, other service providers can innovate in different services and consume those models.

Let’s see how different services might integrate into this ecosystem to help lower the stress level.

Parking — Finding parking in general is stressful, not just in cities, but even in suburbs. I now use ParkMobile to find parking in DC, ParkRTC in Reston, parking permit in office and my knowledge of area in my neighborhood, making driving experience stressful.

If parking services participated in this ecosystem, and track vehicle location and suggested or let me book parking spots, based on my destination information, it would become much more better experience.

Charging / Gas — First, hopefully there are no gas cars in future, but for next 5–10 years, they are still bigger share in the market. While location of these places can be programmed in the vehicle itself (they don’t move yet), however which charging station has space available in next 15 minutes near where I am or headed to, would make it less stressful. TaaS operators perhaps would have their own charging stations in their own service stations or spread across towns.

Service Stations — TaaS operators could clearly own their own Service Stations, given that vehicles traveling many more miles per day would require servicing much more frequently. However, Individual owners like me still spend lot of time figuring out when to take the car for servicing. Perhaps on demand mobile service stations are not going to be a reality, so service stations that can monitor the car diagnostics in real time and offer to service the car at my convenience, would surely reduce the pain. On a different note, I would imagine at some point most of these service stations are purely robot operated, with me just driving the car into an open bay, getting out and letting the robots do the work, sort of like car wash.

Cleaning — TaaS operators would surely need cars cleaned much more often than I clean my own car. TaaS / Rental vehicles would drive much higher miles per day, moving lot of different people. While TaaS could charge customers if they leave the vehicle dirty, cleaning nonetheless would be required. If vehicle itself could sense that it needs cleaning (wonder what that would be? Based on vision? Based on sensing air in the vehicle?), it could place request on VDC and any nearby cleaning service can help with cleaning, thus putting the vehicle back in service quickly.

Infrastructure — Connected cars could play both ways here — get the road conditions on the route and report the observed conditions, thus helping other cars participating in the system. Another example including finding clean bathrooms on a long ride, places to rest on an hourly basis etc.

Car Manufacturer — Over the air car software updates should become a norm soon, thus OEMs would run some sort of VDC anyway. If VDC is not run by OEM, they can certainly participate in VDC, and monitor car health, suggesting any software updates or servicing of other parts of the car. OEMs could also automate the entitlement process over VDC, thus making the experience seamless, for service delivery.

Insurance — Connected Car could completely change how insurance works. While behavior based and per mile insurance are a reality now, what would be interesting would be how real time crash, diagnostics, servicing information, coupled with location information, insurance price changes. If I am parking in high risk area, then insurance price can go up, but if I move to safer spot (say in secure garage), it could drop automatically rather than me taking any action. Better yet, let me buy insurance based on every trip — if I go to DC today and am there for 3 hours, charge differently than if my car is parked inside the garage. It’s not exactly same as per mile insurance, rather much more granular pricing based on all kinds of data.

Registration / Taxes — Just take the money whenever you have and mark the status on VDC, let the law enforcement have access to it, so I do not need to worry about forgetting it anymore. I would not have to put stickers every year on the car anymore.

Inspection — As TaaS operators become reality, they could have inspection done at their own service centers or at their parking spots. However, Individual owners still would be required to take the car to an inspection station yearly. Today, I need to spend lot of time coordinating time and location to take my car for inspection. There is no way for me to even know what the wait times are on any of the nearby stations. In connected car ecosystem, with car diagnostics data available in real time, any inspection station could completely obviate the need for inspection, or could at least indicate to me what I should get fixed before the car would pass inspection. They could still ask me to bring the car for visual inspection, but they can suggest times what would work for me.

Roadside assistance — Most of the stress in owning the car is having an unplanned issue, especially when you are on the road — be it dead battery, tire flat, engine leaking, engine light, windshield — list is just too long. Yes, cars are improving and electric cars coupled with connected cars would eliminate some of these. However, for a layman, it is rather difficult to even figure out what is wrong with the car — except of course flat tire or windshield. Almost all events require either owner’s manual (Google for me now) searching through, or just calling my service technician / dealer ship. They also can’t give me any reliable diagnostic, so I end up taking the car to one of them, not even knowing who is “cheaper and faster” for which event. I mostly flip the coin and decide who is it I am taking it to.

With vehicle information, always available in the VDC to Roadside services, delivering a stress-free experience to the driver becomes easier.

Let’s imagine a predictive model that is continuously evaluating health of various parts of the car, and putting those results back on VDC for driver and any subscribed services to consume. In case of an unhealthy event, either the driver or service provider can initiate the sequence of servicing the car. For example, if the car is parked in my home driveway, and I go on vacation for longer duration, I can authorize service provider to initiate service if my car has an issue. I would also see the results of the predictive models that initiated the sequence, but I do not have to worry as much.

TaaS fleets would almost certainly have this capability in their fleets. Their incentives will be very different than individual owners who anyway are not using their cars 90% of the time, and have other ride services (friends, family, Uber).

In case of such event, service provider can send the required service authorization event to anyone (OEM, insurance) for authorization and get instant authorization before initiating service. If it is already available on VDC, you just do not need authorization from anyone, except driver.

Since Service Centers can on the same VDC, authorized Service Centers could also express their interest in servicing / fixing the car, without any other interaction, and RSA provider simply needs to be notified of where the car needs to go.

Replacement Vehicle — Confirming the results of predictive model and subsequent initiation of service event can trigger replacement vehicle event, based on car owner preference. In case of individual owner, either OEM / Dealer can fulfill this request OR any driver preferred service provider can initiate this service, with the goal of getting the customer out of immediate situation and then longer term replacement, if required. For example, immediate onward mobility could be provided by arranging ride service like Uber / Lyft / Dealer ride service while longer term could be either Dealer or OEM vehicle.

Let’s hope that someone takes this on, and makes the car ownership hassle free.