PRIVACY ALL BUT OVER IN YOUR PERSONAL CAR
With vehicle connectivity becoming commonplace, monitors will help make money off you
By the time you read this, Audi will have A4s and Q7s prowling the streets of Las Vegas — not coincidentally, the home of the humongous Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 5-8 — that can “talk” with traffic lights.
This means that while you’re waiting at a red light, Audi’s Virtual Cockpit will be able to tell you whether you have time to pull off a full face makeover or just put on a smear of lipstick. The same system — Audi rather unimaginatively calls it Traffic Light Information (TLI) — will also inform you on whether your current speed will be get you through the soon-changing green light or whether you should start applying the brakes now. No more slamming on the brakes at the last minute. No more sailing through an intersection on a red hoping John Law isn’t around, because you already have six points on your licence.
Assuming municipalities get this Internet of Things right, Audi’s “time-to-green” system will eventually offer the holy grail of speed management: that perfect average speed by which you’ll sail through 10 (or more!) green lights in a row, with none of those horribly inconvenient reds hindering your rush to work or reducing your fuel economy.
That’s just the tip of the connectivity iceberg. Europe has legislation on the books calling for every car sold in the EU by 2018 to be equipped with an OnStar-like emergency-call function that will automatically alert emergency services in the case of a severe accident. Called eCall, it uses airbag deployment and impact sensors to judge the severity of the collision and determine the appropriate response. Meanwhile, Volvo is introducing Microsoft’s Skype for Business in all its top-of-the-line 90 series cars and SUVs, a productivity enhancer that will allow one-touch conference calling while you drive to work in the morning.
The one common denominator of all these new conveniences is that they require your car to be constantly connected. Audi’s TLI uses a new 4G LTE network to keep in touch, while eCall will require all cars sold in Europe to have a connectivity “dongle” — similar to those used by Ajusto and Progressive Insurance to monitor how slow (or fast) you’re driving — installed no later than April 2018.
In other words, the price of all this convenience and connectivity is that you and your car can now be constantly monitored.
Oh, the authorities promise that the collected information will only be used wisely — the European Commission swears the eCall system will remain “dormant” until an accident occurs — but the fact remains that you and your car can now be kept under constant surveillance. And besides governments’ tenuous ability to keep promises — I am thinking George Bush’s “no new taxes” here and I seem to remember something about Justin Trudeau keeping the deficit to $10 billion — private companies are already heralding this new era of car-to-company conversation as a revolution.
For instance, Honda will be introducing a MyHonda connectivity system ahead of the EU’s 2018 mandate that will let the car directly call a dealership in the case of a mechanical emergency (think of it as a 911 to your mechanic) as well as schedule regularly required maintenance. According to Jean-Marc Streng, Honda Europe’s general manager, this will allow the company to stream all manner of data from the car, telling TU-Automotive that connectivity will “allow a completely different commercial relationship between carmakers and their customers.”
Now, never mind that a car’s ability to schedule its own maintenance might smack up against American anti-trust laws — dealerships have long wanted to capture a greater share of after-warranty repair work and auto dialing would certainly help them monopolize the business — all that data gives the automakers a huge amount of power. And while Streng says, “naturally, we would need an agreement from the customer to be able to use their data,” one can’t help but see the writing on the wall: One of the last bastions of privacy — the inner sanctum of your car — is about to fall.
No matter how much privacy automakers promise, the truth remains that they desperately need to monetize all this connectivity. One of the downsides, at least to auto companies, of their transformation from vehicle manufacturers to “personal mobility” providers is that they may well sell fewer cars. One of the promises of the ride-sharing and autonomous revolutions is that we’ll need fewer cars, as we hitch more rides or one car can be programmed to serve what is now a two-car family.
Automakers, hardly altruists, have bought lock, stock and barrel into this paradigm shift. And if they can’t make their billions on the metal they move, then they’ll want part of the Internet of Things (IoT) business, for example, the US$35-billion marketplace that telematics-monitoring insurance is predicted to become.
Raj Paul, vice-president of Automotive and Emerging Technologies at Lochbridge, a consulting firm that specializes in connected-car technology, told TU-Automotive that, while automakers must make use of technology to stand out from the crowd, differentiation is useless without monetization.
“How do you make money when you’re spending so much on connectivity? One example is usagebased insurance,” Paul said, noting that Progressive already offers discounts to General Motors OnStar users. He calls it a “beautiful monetization model”.
As for old cranks — that would most adamantly include Yours Truly — worrying about privacy issues, it would seem that ship has sailed. Facebook, Snapchat, et al are all integral parts of our lives, now collecting two petabytes (that’s a million gigabytes) of information a day from more than one billion users. Compare that with the measly “tens of kilobytes” Christopher Heiser, chief executive of Renovo Motors, says that traditional automakers collect on a daily basis and you can see the gravy train automakers are hoping Silicon Valley doesn’t derail.
In other words, within a very few years, automakers will have as much information about you as Facebook and Google do (which, according to Heiser, is enough to store every word humanity has ever said many times over). Welcome to the Brave New World of car ownership.