THE TECHNOLOGY TO CONNECT OUR VEHICLES AND COLLECT TONS OF DATA IS RACING AHEAD UNCHECKED. BUT HAVE WE REALLY CONSIDERED THE IMPLICATIONS?
There have been numerous articles written recently about autonomous vehicles, the automated vehicle, and the connected vehicle; as if all of these descriptors were interchangeable synonyms of one another, and all of which somehow relate to Google’s self-drivng car.
The challenge for anyone in the automotive industry — let alone anyone outside of the industry — is the warp speed at which the vehicle is becoming both connected and automated. Indeed, both automation and connectivity are important and necessary precursors to autonomy, as far as vehicles are concerned.
While fully-autonomous vehicles may yet be a decade or so away before all of the challenges that currently confront them are overcome and the technology is robust enough to be fully commercialized, it is the increasingly “connected” vehicle that is drawing attention of another kind. This is highlighting issues that the vehicle manufacturers and the broader automotive supplier community will need to be monitoring very closely.
To put things in perspective, it wasn’t that long ago that a “connected car” amounted to a key fob that could unlock your doors or open your trunk, or perhaps an aftermarket remote starter that could start your car and warm your vehicle without having to leave the house on cold winter days.
However, if you go to test drive any new vehicle today — even some of most inexpensive economy models — you are sure to find some degree of vehicle connectivity, even if it is simply a Bluetooth connection for your smartphone.
That said, vehicle connectivity means different things to different people. So it is worth clarifying the different aspects of connectivity and what some of the issues are that the industry is going have to continue to grapple with as a result of it.
What is V2V?
V2V is the acronym for vehicle-to-vehicle communication or connectivity. Before we ever get to driverless/autonomous vehicles, the vehicles on the road will need to be able to communicate with one another to know where other vehicles are and what they are doing.
These tasks will be carried out generally via Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) which operate in the 5.9 GHz band and functions similar to WiFi.
These wireless communications will also be necessary to assist in connecting the vehicle to the road infrastructure (V2I) so that the vehicle can better understand and operate in the environment in which it is travelling. For instance, understanding traffic lights and signs with the overarching goal from the regulators’ perspective of reducing accidents.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has suggested that connected vehicles could prevent approximately 80 per cent of vehicle accidents involving non-impaired drivers.
The potential for such significant societal benefit has the NHTSA moving towards a requirement for DSRC technology in vehicles over the next few years, with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking expected in 2016.
If you think about the ramifications of that safety statistic for other parts of the automotive industry and other industries, the impact of
vehicle connectivity is huge.
If there are not as many accidents, then presumably our insurance rates should go down as well. Clearly there would be implications for the collision repair industry, the automotive recycling industry, the parts and service operations of automakers and potentially on automotive sales as well.
Even when there are accidents, vehicle connectivity will be able to assist in reducing the incidence of death and serious injuries arising from accidents by decreasing the response time for emergency response vehicles.
PWC has suggested that emergency response times could be cut by 50 per cent in rural areas and 40 per cent in urban areas simply by having the vehicle communicate that it has been in an accident — providing emergency services with the GPS location of the accident, the time of the accident, the direction in which the vehicle was driving, the number of people in the vehicle and the vehicle identification number (VIN).
In Europe, the European Parliament has mandated that all vehicles be equipped with eCall technology that would provide exactly the above-noted date by late 2017.
Societal benefits will not only accrue in the area of vehicle safety. For instance, if vehicles can communicate with one another and with the road infrastructure, then presumably they can travel in a peleton — closer to one another than humans could ever safely drive their vehicles — which improves overall traffic flow while maximizing fuel efficiency.
The benefits for fleets, especially the trucking sector carrying time sensitive cargo can be awe-inspiring as well. Again, PWC suggests that food wastage occurring in transit could be reduced by 10-15 per cent worldwide through the application of connected vehicle technology, resulting in an additional 25 million tonnes of food being available to a hungry world.
The company suggests that 25 million tonnes of food is enough to provide 40 million people with a 2,000 calorie food diet for a year. That would be providing enough food to feed the entire Canadian population for a year — and then some.
However, the benefits of vehicle connectivity are not without challenges. Currently the connected vehicle is coming to the forefront at the same time as so called “big data” and the “Internet of things.”
What is.com describes big data as, “an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.
Big data can be characterized by three Vs: the extreme volume of data, the wide variety of types of data and the velocity at which the data must be processed.”
To put some perspective around the three V’s, data velocity essentially means moving from batch processing to real time processing of information.
Data volume is perhaps more obvious, but the numbers can be overwhelming. Very rapidly computer memory and storage capacity have grown from kilobytes (KB) to megabytes (MB), to gigabytes (GB) to terrabytes (TB), and the cost of memory or storage has dropped precipitously.
A terabyte is over 1000 GB and over 1,000,000 KB. Recently a Delphi equipped Audi SQ5 made the 3400 mile journey from Los Angeles to New York in essentially automated mode, but the more astounding thing was that the vehicle acquired three terabytes of data along the journey.
Connecting the vehicle to the outside world via GPS or the Internet as part of the broader internet of things brings with it challenges. McKinsey & Company note that today’s vehicle, “has the computing power of 20 personal computers, features about 100 million lines of programing code, and processes up to 25 gigabytes of data an hour.”
Connecting the modern vehicle brings with it the challenges of cybersecurity with respect to ensuring the integrity of the vehicle’s system is resilient to hacking, and the protection of the big data that is being shared between the vehicle and the outside world.
The privacy implications associated with the transfer of information from the vehicle and from the consumer’s connection to the vehicle are huge. Consumers have indicated their concern regarding both information safeguarding and data privacy, and in its September 2014 report “What’s driving the connected car”, McKinsey notes once again that vehicle connectivity can be a double-edge sword for consumers.
On the one hand 13 per cent of 2000 consumers surveyed around the world would not even consider a new vehicle that did not have Internet access, while a larger average of 37 per cent indicated that they would not even consider a connected car.
Closer to home a recent survey of 1,002 Canadians conducted by Harris/Decima for the CAA indicated that 50 per cent of respondents were concerned about the privacy risk associated with new connected automotive technologies, with only 28 per cent indicating that the benefits of the technologies outweighed any potential privacy risks.
This issue and concern has not been lost on automakers. In November of 2014 the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Global Automakers in the United States voluntarily introduced “Consumer Privacy Protection Principles for Vehicle Technologies and Services” to which their 19 members collectively have committed to implement.
In Canada, the privacy of consumer information has been governed by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) since 2000, which provides Canadian consumers with more robust privacy protections in the area of the connected car than those offered in the United States under the automakers voluntary code.
That said, the warp speed with which the connected car technologies are evolving necessitates that vehicle manufacturers, dealers and service providers to the connected car be vigilant to ensure ongoing compliance with Canada’s privacy laws and to put consumers’ minds at ease when tapping into the huge personal and societal benefits that vehicle connectivity will bring.
