Our Research Director, Neil Shah moderated a panel on “Automotive Telematics & IoT for New Era of Mobility” at TI Automotive in Pune. Following is a summary of different topics which were discussed on the next era of telematics and automotive industry during the panel discussion: Telematics Adoption in Vehicle & Assets Drivers: Connecting vehicles and assets with telematics have been growing in adoption especially in commercial vehicles but will grow exponentially in coming years. The major drivers for the adoption, when polled across the panelists, were:

• Transition to the electric drivetrain
• Robust pan India connectivity,
• Cloud infrastructure strategy
• Massification of connected asset use-cases,
• Data and services models clarity
• Encouraging policy and regulation mandate from the government

Key Use-Cases for the Telemetry Data: Once millions of assets are connected and transmitting streams of data, what needs to be done with the data is going to be the key. “Data is the new crude”, how it will convert into oil and reach the destination is what industry needs to prioritize and figure out. The top use-cases for the telemetry sensor data from the assets/vehicles when polled across the panelists were:

• Communicating with the infrastructure (using tech likes cloud, edge computing, V2X, 5G)
• Preventive Maintenance (driving revenue opportunities for dealers/service centers) informing users to take care of their vehicles
• Real-time transportation information (Intelligent transportation systems – ITS)
• Slicing the data into different use-cases and build services (e.g. smart parking, smart live traffic, smart cities, EV charging infra)
• Data to be used for achieving business KPIs for OEMs (customer service, quality control. Sales, marketing effectiveness, etc)

Data Privacy & Security: Once the data leaves the vehicles, assets and sits in an OEM or service provider cloud, it's going to be important how that data is used to either improve products, build newer services or for achieving business KPIs. Further, since this data is specific to a particular user/customer and the asset is always connected – privacy and security become paramount. Also, who owns the data will be critical. When the panelists discussed this topic, the following are the views –

• Anonymization of data is going to be the first step and protecting the privacy of the data maintaining robust security and privacy controls following regulations and guidelines such as GDPR should be baked in.
• Data ownership might be an issue, but a bigger issue is who has access to the data which will be critical.
• In most cases, the user will be the owner of the data, other stakeholders will be just managing the access to build the services on top of it or use it to improve the products and experiences.

Overall, the future of connected vehicles is very bright and this digital transformation will drive newer business models, mobility experiences and savings we haven’t seen before for every industry stakeholder. The full video of the panel discussion is available below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2fEzuySOoI