Who’s talking up connected car services?

Who’s talking about the connected car?

Executives from a range of industries beyond automotive have been speaking with investors and analysts about how they see their prospects for benefiting from connected car services. RCR Wireless News went through recent comments from a number of industries to get a read on how infotainment, payment, navigation and insurance companies see the connected car opportunity.

AllState and the connected car

“We think the personal transportation industry is going to change dramatically and we think that’s an opportunity for us to do more for our customers. … We have about $4 trillion tied up in hardware called cars and trucks and stuff like that. We spend about $2 trillion a year in direct costs making that work. Capacity utilization … even at peak hours is in the 30%, 34% range and there’s one person in the car. A 20% improvement in the efficiency of that system would be a 5% increase in household income in America.

“We think that’s going to happen. It’s going to take a while to happen, because it’s an economically dispersed system. Nobody controls all of it, there’s lots of different pieces to it. So, it’s not just the autonomous car, it’s shared vehicle, it’s machine-to-machine communication, it’s better stoplights. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s going to change in that system.

“Arity [AllState’s new stand-alone telematics business] is one of our efforts to take advantage of that. … It provides services to Allstate and Esurance. … First, it gives them the ability to do a more accurate price for our customers, because we know exactly how they drive, where they drive and when they drive. But we have a different model than others. We’ve taken it beyond pricing to include things like improving the driving experience. So adding applications on to our continuous connection, to help those customers have a better driving experience and then also to use that technology for other things.

“There [are] many other uses, many other ways that value could be created by cars being connected. We can share that value with customers. We can use that value to reduce costs for other people and capture those costs. So, there’s really a three-part focus: better pricing, better services and additional ways to use a connected car. So Arity is pursuing all three of those. It will do that for our insurance companies, we’ll do it for non-insurance companies and we will also do it for other insurance companies as well.”  – AllState CEO Tom Wilson, November 2016 earnings call 

MasterCard and the connected car

“We will have 80 million, roughly, worldwide enabled accounts on Masterpass by the end of the year. The majority of those will be in North America. And when you have got consumers using the products at that sort of scale, it starts to change the equation and the dynamic in the market. … It also then creates opportunities for us to take these new use cases that MasterCard Labs is so fantastic at working on our partners to develop and … get those enabled in the marketplace. … Whether that’s a use case around pay-at-the-table, or use case around a parking application, or use case around a connected car, whatever the case may be.

“We formed [a partnership] with General Motors to focus on the development of connected cars. A completely different use case, but an example of the kinds of applications that this connectedness of devices and digital technology will enable us to participate in: connected cars, where their operating system in the car will enable people to do things like pay a toll, buy gas, pay for parking, potentially shop. Hopefully not while they are driving, but at least while they are in the car. There is a wide range of interesting use cases like that, that we are working on.” – Craig Vosburg, President, North America, MasterCard, during September 2016 investors meeting 

Telenav and the connected car

“Our goal is to create the largest connected car network in the industry. Our strategy to achieve our goal is to develop key partnerships with global auto OEMs by leveraging connected car technology to allow them to offer branded services and differentiated solutions to their customers. Our strategy is also to align our long-term interest with our auto OEM partners by helping them to achieve cost efficiency and new monetization. By connecting the auto OEM fleet and leveraging the data and learning that results from such extensive ecosystem, we can offer drivers a better quality and safer driving experience.

“Another integral product of our connected car strategy is to create new revenue opportunities for our order OEM partners and Telenav. … For the location-based advertising business, during the quarter we achieved 30% sequential revenue growth and over 50% improvement in our sequential adopted [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] results. We’re encouraged by our cost management and revenue growth. However, our revenue scale from advertising is still relatively small.” –HP Jin, President and CEO, Telenav, during November 2016 earnings call

Pandora and the connected car

“This new partnership [with Uber] is pretty exciting and … it’s working, it has become the fifth largest auto platform for us. Now, it’s a different kind of auto platform, because it’s not your car, but it’s listening in the car. … We started with the drivers. We got the drivers engaged. Their connection in the car and the music playing through their driver app was going through the speakers. Seems like an obvious thing. We focused on that first … then started to open it up for listeners. So, in the rider app if you pull up and your driver is listening to Pandora you’ll see … what they’re listening to on Pandora and you can continue jamming or flip it over to your station, or you can just start listening to Pandora on the stations you love while you are on your ride.

“We are very excited the rapid growth we’re seeing, again building it and launching it in a way that gets adoption and traction and it’s an ad-supported solution. We didn’t lock this up behind a pay wall.” – Christopher Phillips, Chief Product Officer, Pandora Media, 3Q earnings call

Looking for more information on connected car trends and related services? Check out RCR Wireless News’ free special report. 

Image copyright: jirsak / 123RF Stock Photo