There are a number of ways to define “connected cars” – all of which related to the ability of the car to connect sensors, devices such as smartphone or tablet, or car ports to enable a number of functions including navigation, checking the state of the components such as the engine, infotainment, home/office, infrastructure, businesses, services and many more. There are a number of joining the connected car race. There’s the natural players – car manufacturers – and they now find themselves competing with Google and Apple. Not only are they competing in the newly formed self-driving car market, but also in the industry of connected cars as a whole.
Gartner is predicting that by 2020, around one in five vehicles on the road globally will have some form of wireless network connection, adding up to more than 250 million connected vehicles. It’s expected that this connected car market could be worth between $170-270 billion by 2020. 52% of this will be just how much the car costs. It’s expected that, by 2020, this will come down to 49% while connectivity – which currently makes up about 4% of the value of the market – will rise to 7%. It’s expected that everything else, such as the insurance and maintenance of the cars, will be the same. Car manufacturers will need to compete with the other players entering the game, and they will need to partner up with providers of 5G telecommunications to keep the cars connected.
Table of contents
How to Monetize the Connected Car
A number of new business models have been opened up by the connected car industry. This includes carpooling solutions such as Uber, Lyft, LeCab, Haxi, and usage-based driving solutions like Car2Go. Even car insurance providers are making use of car telematics to learn more about individual drivers and offer insurance based on their own personal driving.
A big challenge of the new ecosystem is finding ways to monetize these innovative solutions and make them economically viable. There are some questions that must be answered to do this, including; how much will customers pay for these services? Will they even pay for them? There is also the challenge of processing all of the data that these 250 million cars will be generating by 2020.
There is also a challenge in regards to the players taking part. Not only will car manufacturers and communication service providers be involved, but there will also be involvement from IoT platform providers for managing the data from the sensors. On top of this, you can expect regulators, municipal bodies, governments, and their regulations to play an important part in monetizing the connected car.
Behind the Scenes of Connected Cars
There is a range of transactions involved with driving a car 20KM downtown from your suburban neighbourhood in 40 minutes. This involves ordering the car; choosing the car you want, along with the usage package, duration, and insurance; choosing the music you want to listen to; actually driving to the city centre and paying the toll; and paying for parking when you arrive. During this time, a range of telematics about the car, such as the engine condition and fuel consumption, will be sent to the car manufacturer.
This means that, even in a short drive, there re whole host of entities playing their parts; including the provider of the car – creating the next generation of car rental; the insurance provider issuing “per hour” or “per day” insurance; OTT players such as Apple and Google providing the music; the parking lot; any congestion tolls; etc.
It takes a real-time, scalable, and flexible cloud billing solution like Tridens Monetization to handle these interactions. Tridens Monetization captures and rates all of these transactions, consolidating the charges to the customer into a single bill, while also separating the charges from the cost of the insurance, fuel, car communications, etc., from the car provider. To do that, Tridens Monetization, which is a billing as a service (BaaS) offers pricing, rating, and billing features such as one time fees, recurring fees (weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi annually, annually), rating based on tiered and time, all sorts of discounting– including billing ones, split billing (charge and resource sharing), and many more.