A breakthrough for driver safety and convenience

The weather sometimes surprises us. It’s often an inconvenience, but it can be so much more than that. Picture yourself driving on a cold dark night, you approach a bend at normal speed not knowing that the road is covered in black ice. Even the best of drivers would lose control of the vehicle without knowledge of the road conditions... What if there was a real-time alert service which could give a warning of the dangerous conditions and suggest a slower speed? The same service could also provide suggestions such as street parking lots in your vicinity that are large enough for your car. It would bring ongoing safety and convenience to your driving experience.

The right edge-to-cloud architecture can lead to the innovations that make it all possible. In the automotive industry the power of the brand is shifting with the power of tech. I love performance cars (and have my favorite brand) but overall changed buyer perception is reflected in the offers presented by leading car manufacturers, with accessories, entertainment, and additional features taking precedence over body design and even performance. The logo on the hood now represents not only what’s under it, but what it’s connected to beyond that and beyond the car itself. Data and tech innovations are increasingly providing opportunities for manufacturers to increase appeal, supplementing brand loyalty with the tech loyalty of today’s world.

The challenge for the manufacturers is, that in order to deliver the best digital in-car experience they need a lot of data-- more data than they are able to collect individually. The chance is there to offer en route weather warnings, real-time traffic alerts, automated parking space suggestions, in car offers for local services, and more, but it’s all dependent on the data.

The prospect is significant and goes beyond market appeal based on changed purchaser behavior. In the automotive world alone, sharing vehicle sensor data across vendors could solve some of our toughest traffic problems, make roads and cities safer, and create new business for the automotive industry. It’s a big step towards autonomous driving. This opportunity cannot be achieved until we establish data sharing between companies using procedures that create trust — based on the principles of data sovereignty, security, transparency and last, but not least, efficiency.

Data is the foundation for the car industry to make the pivot forward to becoming a mobility service provider. But, in order to obtain the amount of data necessary to provide the desired capabilities on a global scale, collaboration is a requirement.

In a strategic partnership between Continental and our HPE Pointnext team, we have jointly created a new platform, leveraging blockchain technology to enable a breakthrough for the exchange of data required to deliver the vehicle experience demanded by today’s end users. It provides the key to unlocking the value of data, not by taking control of it ourselves, but by empowering the drivers and car manufacturers to have control of their data throughout the process. At the same time, the platform helps car manufacturers to monetize their data and differentiate their brand. We believe that across many industries, this approach will be the paragon of edge-to-cloud architecture for how to release the value and potential of data, allowing its exchange by creating trust between businesses.

In this platform, car manufacturers keep storing the data in their own data centers, only sharing specific data sets directly with the buyer upon purchase. This approach gives data sovereignty to all participants in the ecosystem, while at the same time providing a highly efficient and secure procedure for monetizing vehicle data. The platform enables secure transactions where data is encrypted and sent directly from one party to another, with no middleman. This enables the manufacturers to stay in control and get data points from a vast pool around the world.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress we’re demonstrating how the platform empowers all participants, including the users (drivers), to decide whether they want to share data and, if so, which data they want to share. All parties know their data is in their own control and only exchanged directly, securely, and mutually beneficially.

This decentral approach as a novel way of creating trust to enable data sharing and ecosystems could be revolutionary in so many areas. The end user in the end is the decision maker- looking for experiences and capabilities that can be provided by a number of vendors. Those that can offer the best experience, based on the biggest data set, will be the ones speeding away from the rest. This will determine the market leaders and the market losers. Our new platform for exchanging data, even between competitors, creates the opportunity for us all to be winners.