At some point in 2015/2016, right when hypes like big data and the Internet of Things reached where present all around, my colleague Alexander Stocker come up with the idea that he’d like to work on something that we can later use ourself, and to meet company interests, it would be nice if it’s based on vehicle data.

After some quick research Alex found some successful start-ups from the US, which use vehicle data collected from the on board diagnostic (OBD) interface in order to calculate and provide statistics to the driver. We (Alex, Prof. Michael Fellmann and I) deciced to analyze their ideas, potentials, business models a little bit into detail and to publish it, as the trend seemed to be quite new to ICT companies of the European Union. However, within H2020 there is the so called automat-project where the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) VW AG, Renault SAS partner with Centro Ricerche Fiat SCPA and several research companies. This automat-project aims to work on a vehicle data ecosystem, where applications can use vehicle data. Of course, OEMs are interested to become platform and data provider, as those roles seem to be the most profitable ones for now. Therefore it’s not surprising that an OEM backend (seen on the left in the following image which illustrates the automat-project concept) should be the core of the automat-project ecosystem concept.

The quantified car thesis idea aims to analyze business models and different ecosystem setup possibilities (open, closed, hybrid) in order to find the best ones from different stakeholder perspectives (driver, OEM, organizations like road operators, research, ..)