Big data in the driver’s seat of connected car technological advances

Growth in the automotive industry’s highly integrated and highly saturated connected car systems will yield approximately $14.5 billion in revenue from automotive data assets by 2020, according to a connected car study from IHS Automotive, driven by Polk.

“Traditionally Big Data has focused on the ‘4 V’s’ – volume, velocity, variety and veracity”

In the study, Emerging Technologies: Big Data in the Connected Car, IHS Automotive forecasts there will be 152 million actively connected cars on global roads by 2020, a fraction of the estimated 18 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the planet. The study estimates $14.5 billion of value from the OEM connected car landscape from a variety of Big Data assets found in the connected car – diagnostics, location, user experience (UX) /feature tracking, and adaptive driver assistance systems (ADAS)/autonomy. Significantly, the technology growth will drive sales, value-added services and customer experience in the sector for years to come.

“Traditionally Big Data has focused on the ‘4 V’s’ – volume, velocity, variety and veracity,” says Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst of infotainment and Human-Machine Interface (HMI) at IHS Automotive. “But without understanding the fifth ’V,’ value and the value proposition, the collection of data from the connected car is literally a waste of time. It is important to understand how data from intelligently designed systems will drive billions of dollars of annual revenue between data assets, analytics, and end-user services.”

IHS Automotive estimates conservatively that more than 480 terabytes of data will be collected from the OEM connected car landscape in 2013 through millions of small data transmissions sent through more than 26 million connected cars. A combination of increased connected car sales and a growing scale of information coming from connected cars will result in the collection of some 11.1 petabytes of connected car data by 2020.

The rate at which the data are flowing from the connected car landscape is also growing dramatically. The study says that about 30 terabytes of data would be collected each day from the 152 million connected cars on the road in 2020, or about 350 megabytes per second, compared to about 15 megabytes per second in 2013.

At present, the majority of connected car data that is collected is used internally for diagnostics, location, speed, and vehicle status. By 2020, the IHS Automotive study expects four core categories of data to be most important to automakers, suppliers, third parties and end-users -- diagnostics, location, user experience/features, and adaptive driver assistance systems/autonomy data. Because they will require so much more volume and variety, ADAS/Autonomy is expected to be the largest and most expensive data category in the future.

“The most important challenge this industry has in front of it is organizing systems and defining roles in Big Data from the connected car. Who owns the data, the pipe, and the analytics is still yet to be determined, and will have to be before connected car data can be put to work efficiently,” said Boyadjis.

To request a copy of Emerging Technologies: Big Data in the Connected Car e-mail [email protected].