Automotive Data and the Future of Mobility: Highlights from The Urban Loop Podcast

Otonomo’s CEO and founder, Ben Volkow, sat down with Rohan Dasika of The Urban Loop podcast to discuss connected cars, automotive data, traffic management, data privacy, and entrepreneurism. The Urban Loop is dedicated to the intersection of technology and public policy, and focuses on smart cities and urban development. Esteemed guests of the podcast include leaders from a variety of backgrounds including entrepreneurs of technology companies, transportation officials of major municipalities, esteemed academics, and smart cities experts. Otonomo is honored to have been invited to the podcast to share how our automotive data marketplace is contributing to the future of mobility. Continue reading below for highlights from the show.

Urban Loop:  What is automotive data? What are some different types of data?

Ben Volkow: Many cars are coming out with embedded modems. Some manufacturers, like BMW, have been connected for years, and other OEMs are following. Connected cars are constantly sending data back to the OEMs, who are in turn using it for internal analytics to improve their vehicles.

Connected cars are capable of producing many data parameters, in some cases over 150 parameters every few seconds. This could be information about the vehicle’s location, engine status, battery life, the number of passengers in the car, whether seat belts are being used, if the airbags are working, the status of windows and doors, and more.

One of the most exciting parameters is sensor data. For example, two million cars on our platform have cameras from different manufacturers, such as Valeo or Mobileye, which send data. There is also data from ultrasonic sensors or parking sensors. All of this is being utilized.

If you think about it, the car is becoming a moving sensor on wheels. It isn’t just for driving anymore, it is a sensor that collects data that can be used to improve the environment and improve our lives.

Urban Loop: How can connected vehicle data be used?

Ben Volkow: Smart Cities are a great use case. They use speed information to tune adaptive traffic lights, suspension information to find holes in the roads, and they can get real-time information about the location and specifics of an accident so they can send services or identify dangerous places in the city.  Smart cities also use the information coming from cameras in the connected vehicle to identify hazards in real-time, such as dangerous driving conditions like fog, and to identify any problems with street signs. Smart Cities are just one example, there are many industries and thousands of businesses that are interested in this data.

Parking is another great example. People spend 30% of their time in urban areas looking for parking. If I can connect your car to an app that saves you time, even 2 minutes a day looking for parking, there is much more value there than another 5 or 10 in horsepower.

I’ll give you another example. We have an amazing partner that deals with emergency services. They can use real-time data from the car to send emergency services faster. More than that, they communicate vital data to emergency responders about the number of passengers, seat belts, impact speeds, and where the car was hit. This saves lives.

Urban Loop: There is a lot of data being collected, but there is no translation from data collection to how the data is being applied. How does Otonomo collect and translate this data to a certain standard that is usable for a third party service?

Ben Volkow: Vehicle data is built for the needs of the car manufacturer. It’s very technical, and different between car manufacturers. There is no common standard: some manufacturers give fuel levels in liters, others in gallons, others in percentages. Otonomo creates a standard, common language that service providers can use.

Another problem is that the data is “dirty.” It is common to find mistakes, and it needs to be sanitized. Our platform cleans the data to make it usable.

Urban Loop: Where do OEMs capture profit from data consumption by third parties?

Ben Volkow: OEMs understand that data plays a big part in their future. Car manufacturers historically have “given away” businesses. Think about fuel stations, or garages, it would make sense for car manufacturers to own these businesses, but they don’t. With data, they don’t want to make the same mistake.

Car manufacturers understand their limits, they are really good at making cars, but they can’t do everything in-house. They understand that they need to partner. At Otonomo, we take their data and share it with companies that can build car centric services. Car manufacturers can benefit from the power of community.

We try to help them be like Apple and Google. If you go into an app store, and download an app, the app pays 30% to Apple. The car manufacturers don’t build the app, but they are collecting and securing the data, and should get paid for it. If they can be part of this new ecosystem and get a percentage, it’s a win-win for everyone.

Urban Loop: How do you work with tier one, two or three suppliers?

Ben Volkow: We are very lucky as a startup to be in a brand new domain, not dealing with cars, and dealing with data, so the car manufacturers have chosen to work directly with us. We bring different know-how than a tier one. We also often work with the suppliers to supply them with data.

For example, we have a tier one that is one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world. We are helping to offer information from the car for predictive maintenance. We can offer data on temperature, driving style, etc. The company can analyze the connected vehicle data, because no one knows tires better than them, and if some tires are problematic, the tire company can go back to the car manufacturer and advise replacements. In this case, the tire manufacturer has an opportunity to upsell, and the OEM can generate additional value for its customers, who develop even more trust in the car. It’s a win-win.

Another case is with a supplier that makes turbochargers. The company has never had the chance to test his product on a large scale. We can supply information from millions of vehicles, driving in different conditions with different driving styles.

OEMs and tier ones pay billions of dollars a year in recalls. If they can use data to find problems in advance, it is much cheaper for them. This is changing the entire supply chain of car making.

Urban Loop: It’s not just the automotive data, right? The way your platform is built there is a tighter feedback loop, so you know issues sooner, and can fix them before they become a bigger problem.

Ben Volkow: Exactly. We have an interesting pilot that I will share. Each of us has a different driving style, and cars are tuned somewhere in the middle. Information about driving style can optimize fuel usage, and cars can get 15-20% more miles with the same amount of fuel. So we can give automotive data to the tier one suppliers who can use their own algorithms to send a new configuration to a vehicle “over the air.” All of a sudden, a car can get better mileage on the same amount of fuel. This is the future of mobility.

Urban Loop: The drivers are generating the automotive data. What sort of ownership do drivers have over the data?

Ben Volkow: We always say: “Drivers first.” The driver owns the data, there is no question about that. The OEMs are the custodians of the data. This is similar to a bank. You have your money in a bank account, but the bank is securing it and investing it, and taking something in return for his work.

This is the same with the OEM. The data is the driver’s, but the OEM is extracting the data, investing in hardware and software and security. He should get something for that. The data is by default not allowed to be shared with a third party without approval. There is loose consent and strong consent. In the case of aggregated or anonymized data, loose consent is good enough. When you buy a car at a dealership or rent a car, it’s in the contract. This aggregate data is anonymized, so no one knows your identity. The specifics determining anonymized data vary based on location. For example, in Germany, you need to take out the first few minutes of a drive, so someone doesn’t know where you live. Part of what we do is handle compliance for the car manufacturers.

For personal data, much stronger consent is needed. The driver must know the use case and be able to revoke consent at any given moment.

From time to time we see big technology companies in the headlines getting fines for breaches in data privacy. You don’t see car manufacturers doing that. With car manufacturers, they don’t cut corners or take risks. For OEMs, customers are first, and customer data privacy is first. They have very strict requirements that aren’t easy to satisfy. They are on a level of their own, much more that what we are used to in the technology world.

I believe that people will gladly share their data if they get value. If I can get insurance for 30% cheaper, if there is a service that saves lives, or an app that saves me time parking, please, take my data!

We see some interesting models coming from the OEMs about giving back to drivers. In exchange from data that can be monetized, they might give a certain amount of money per mile, or an extended warranty, or free services. They know from monitoring cars whether someone is a good driver, they know they aren’t a big risk. Car manufacturers are coming with new concepts to create value to drivers in return for sharing their automotive data.

Urban Loop: Otonomo is a company venturing into very uncharted territory. How did you get started?

Ben Volkow: I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years, I am what is called a serial entrepreneur. I really enjoy the journey of defying odds to make an idea into a real-world product. My previous company was acquired by a big Seattle company called F5, and one day we got a knock on the door from a German car manufacturer to come help them with data. I found myself going there to represent the company and discussing the future of automotive technology: cloud connectivity and data. I saw that everything that I was doing for many years in other industries was moving to the automotive domain. It isn’t only about bending metal anymore, it is about cloud and security. And I was sure I could contribute.

What is happening today around automotive and the future of mobility is one of the biggest revolutions in our lifetime. If you think about it, cars are the last domain to be connected. They aren’t part of the larger digital ecosystem, but that is changing.

Urban Loop: What did the company look like early on, and how has it changed?

Ben Volkow: We were a small startup going to OEMs and asking to manage their crown jewels. They knew that data was the new oil, it is the future, but it was sitting in the basement creating no value. But they knew it was the most important thing in the world.

It was a very delicate tango to get their trust, to go though the legal process, the human process, and the technical process. The first OEM we signed with was Daimler, and it took us 3 years of testing. And that’s a short time in the automotive industry. The moment that we got their trust, it gave us a lot of backing in the market and others came on.

OEMs understood it was time to move forward with connected cars. My team worked hard to build a lot of technology. One of the nice things about being a marketplace is that we see what is called a flywheel effect. Air BNB is a marketplace, and we have many of the same challenges. But once you get a marketplace up and running, you see things moving faster and faster. We are seeing more OEMs and more consumers.

Click here to listen to the entire interview on The Urban Loop podcast.

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