We have been working on projects in the mobility sector for quite some time now. Mostly on making it possible for other companies to build connected car applications. But this time it is our first major step to build products using real-time car data.
What is a connected car?
Connected car is a car that is connected to the internet. There are already lots of cars on our roads that have an internet connection. Connected cars use that connection to report the status of the vehicle in real-time, for example, the vehicle location, fuel level and diagnostics data. In addition to broadcasting the state of the vehicle, it also can receive commands and perform actions based on that like opening the door locks and setting the GPS destination.
Prototype
We have built a prototype app where a car owner can log in, give our application access to some specific data points of the vehicle. From the app we can see the location of the vehicle on a map in real time. It is just a simple example of how we can access real car data although under the hood we have gone through the entire process of integrating with different car brands and review processes to get our application approved for production car data access.
Possibilities
So far we have seen 1st party apps from the car manufacturers themselves, which the car owners can use to perform basic actions on the car. However, car manufacturers have been investing heavily in recent years in making real-time car data available for 3rd party developers as well so everyone could build apps that make use of car data.
This situation can be compared to Apple launching the App Store. Before the app store we had the 1st party apps like phone, messaging, calendar, web browser, etc but after exposing the development tools to everyone, we have seen the outcome — a huge mobile app development industry grew out of it and the imagination is endless what kind of applications can be built.
There are already some products on the market that cover fleet management, maintenance overview based on diagnostics data and pay-as-you-drive type insurance (where the cost of insurance is calculated based on the milage of the car, not based on a fixed monthly fee) but as the car makers gradually open up more data points for different functions of the vehicles, we can see more innovative business opportunities emerging.
Next steps
We’ll be combining the knowledge we got building this prototype and our experience in building digital products and making the next step to build practical products in this sector. We have seen the entire process of developing and publishing a connected car application which gives us an advantage in the next round.
