Defining the industry connected car landscape was challenging.
It started with the very first question for the interview participants: What category would you describe yourself as within the connected car landscape? Thinking this would be an easy question, many respondents considered it to be a difficult one – not because they didn’t have clear messaging, but because the connected car landscape continues to morph at a high rate of speed and how/who you work with today could change from how/who you work with tomorrow. Although some firms were completely focused on the market, others had a wider focus, either by itself or part of an M2M or IoT organization. That’s where the descriptions got more challenging.
After reviewing other attempts at industry landscapes, RCR Wireless News took a path different from trying to name all of the categories within the ecosystems that operate within the industry landscape. If the path focused on naming the categories, it’s easy when you look at OEM, Tier 1, mobile network operator and app developer, for example. But then it gets really complex: What about the companies who cross multiple categories, what are they? And what about all those companies who are trying to micro-segment and create new categories? This simply doesn’t work unless you create a list of endless categories within the landscape.
The second path considered was that of a value chain of who works with whom. Again, this created an endless loop of relationships. First, take all of the companies that change how the categories were defined and then try to link them all together. The spider web of linkages wouldn’t be of value to anyone.
Finally, a concept emerged – the connected car universe. A universe is defined as “all existing matter and space considered as a whole” or the cosmos. Within the universe there are different galaxies within which there are different moons, planets and stars that orbit each other. They come in different sizes and have different numbers of stars, moons and planets.
Predictions for the next two years
Everyone loves predictions. Some interview participants for RCR Wireless News’ feature report were very conservative and some really went out on a limb. Below they are segmented into two categories, the top 10 most likely to succeed – those with a reasonable chance of occurring – and the top 10 movers and shakers – those that are more controversial.
Most likely to succeed:
- Integration of everything happens with the car connected to the home and new partnerships cross the industry to enable.
- Market shifts away from new cool offers to focus on the customer experience.
- Startups are the organizations that drive innovation and more appear to take the lead.
- The Smart City and the Smart Car connect.
- More concern is raised over the security of the connected car.
- The in-car experience starts to look more like the iPhone experience – it takes me somewhere I’ve never been able to go before and becomes more interesting to the end consumer.
- More governments come into play that drive the deployment of V2I.
- New car-sharing models emerge – more OEMs offer DriveNow-type services and digital keys replace current car-entry models​.
- The first OEM launches OTA programmable SIM as standard.
- MNOs start offering “connected car” packages with new monetization options – not just minutes or bandwidth – car-oriented services.
Movers and shakers:
- First public hack of a connected car.
- First OTA bug fix.
- A single OEM leaps far ahead of the rest of the pack.
- First OEM is blackmailed due to connected car security vulnerabilities.
- Content can be transferred from your home to your car. Stop watching a movie in the house, the kids start at the same spot in the car and other similar services.
- Connect to a neighboring car’s Wi-Fi in traffic.
- First person is killed by an autonomous car accident causing public fear of autonomous cars.
- The U.S. mandates V2I.
- China becomes the “pilot” country for autonomous driving.
- Pedestrian to bike to car connectivity is a reality.
There was also some discussion around the fact that as exciting as all this is and for all the reasons mentioned as challenges throughout this document, the industry won’t move as fast as everyone would like, and as a result, not much new will happen over the next two years. Let’s hope that’s not the case.
Want to learn more about these topics? Download RCR’s connected car industry landscape feature report and see the results of interviews with 26 industry experts on the topics of security, industry challenges to the connected car and definitions of how the key topics in this area potentially fit together. The link to access the report is here. Also available is an on-demand link to the companion webinar on these topics.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
