Technical Insight
THE DAWN OF CONNECTIVITY MONETIZATION: WHAT IS VEHICLE LOCATION-BASED SERVICES (VLBS)? ANKIT BHATIA
Sheeva.AI
Current Trends in Connected Vehicle Monetization Connectivity has been offering an immense value to the vehicle owners via a new universe of connected features and services across critical consumer needs: safety, convenience, security, entertainment, and vehicle diagnostics. Almost all of India’s OEMs have started offering these features and services as a part of their connected vehicle strategy; prominent examples include Suzuki Connect, Hyundai blueLink, Tata iRA/ ZConnect, Mahindra AdrenoX, and MG iSmart. The automotive industry in India is going through a digital transformation. The vehicle is not merely a commodity for OEMs and Tier-1s. Its architectures are increasingly becoming software-defined to offer customization and monetize safety-critical features and infotainment to, ultimately, vehicle performance. Though the monetization prospects in this segment are huge -- and they are gradually being tapped across the entire automotive value chain in India -- the features and services are still limited to the vehicle platform. The true disruption in monetization avenues and business models is happening outside the vehicle platform, where the vehicle becomes a part of either the driver’s digital ecosystem or a vehicle-centric services infrastructure. By integrating the driver’s existing digital ecosystem, including smart devices, voice assistants, and other content and apps, a seamless user experience is being created to derive new value from the 26 | Telematics Wire | February 2022
vehicle. At the same time, the utility of these new platforms is being analyzed for infrastructure-based services and solutions, like traffic management, city planning, usage-based insurance (UBI), shared mobility, and GNSS tolling. As well, it can enable easier access to essential services like fueling, parking and curbside pick-up/drive-thru. Once the vehicle becomes a part of a larger ecosystem, the value perceived and derived can be transformational. To leverage these opportunities of the connected ecosystem around the vehicle, an extensive amount of data is being generated, gathered, stored, and analyzed to extract actionable insights. This data can have several attributes centred around driver preferences, services patterns, and many others, but the most significant among these attributes is location intelligence. The insights derived from other attributes remain static but when coupled with vehicle location, such attributes become dynamic and offer rich context. Vehicle Location Based Services (VLBS) encompasses the whole spectrum of services associated with position accuracy, including fueling, parking, tolling, curbside service, insurance, fleet management, along with smart city planning.
What enables VLBS? Vehicle location has the power to transform the way transactions occur and services are delivered, collectively termed “in-vehicle commerce” or v-commerce. In the 1990s and 2000s, the boom in personal computers and the internet connected
retailers and buyers directly, which was the first form of e-commerce. As smartphones proliferated in the late 2000s, commerce shifted to these new mobile computers we all carried in our pockets, and m-commerce was born. But through the history of these digital commerce formats, the following enablers, which are dubbed “LIPUN,” remained critical at each stage: ● Location (L): Source and destination of goods ● Identity (I): Know your customer (KYC) ● Presence (P): Customer authentication ● Ubiquitous Notifications (UN): Around-the-clock ability to connect The next frontier of digital commerce will see integration into the vehicle, but the core enablers of “LIPUN” will remain the same. To create a seamless user experience akin to e-commerce & m-commerce, the vehicle platform needs to deliver on all these enablers simultaneously.
The Path to VLBS Monetization The current set of solutions around VLBS are being delivered primarily in two modes – the latent service layer and the real-time service layer. With the latent service layer, the data from the connected vehicles are stored over the cloud in a raw format. The conventional means of data cleaning, mining, and analysis are conducted to provide meaning. The solution providers have created aggregation and software platforms following data privacy
