Connectivity and partnerships will redefine mobility

Date: Wednesday May 4, 2016

Over the past year, there have been real shifts in the connected mobility landscape involving players from across the mobility spectrum. Sensing visceral threats to their existence, carmakers are at the forefront of these changes. In a recent interview, Ford CEO Mark Fields noted that: “There are a lot of new non-traditional competitors who are looking at the addressable market and saying, ‘We can get a piece of that.’”

And it is a big piece; we just launched the Connected Mobility Global Forecast, which assessed 14 connected car services. Combined, these services will generate $350 billion in revenues by 2020. You can see our new presentation about the forecast here.

Of course carmakers and automotive manufacturers are not the only sectors under threat from new entrants. Traditional mobility service providers such as roadside assistance companies, tolling operators, insurers, fleet management services (FMS) and automobile clubs, face very real challenges. We have already seen how the personal navigation market – once a profitable enterprise for mapping and device vendors such as TomTom, HERE and Garmin – has become completely dominated by Google Maps, but also how maps are now used in over 3 billion connected devices.

man holding phone with the ford mobility app - connected mobility

 

Ford’s mobility app connects to its Sync platform

 

 

 

Now, vehicle leasers have begun to provide their own low-cost FMS solutions to fleets. Insurance telematics suppliers such as Intelligent Mechatronic Systems (IMS) are winning tenders to supply services and devices to the next generation of road user charging schemes as well as insurance telematics using new device types (see next week’s blog). Didi Chuxing (a Chinese car sharing, pooling and leasing company) now fulfils more than 83% of China’s taxi-hailing market and claims to fulfil over 10 million rides per day (pooled rides represent up to 30% of these).

Uber-style marketplaces are also emerging for pay-as-you-use roadside assistance in almost all major geographical markets. All these exemplify disruptions brought about by a lack of connectivity within traditional car services and the ability of new providers to access ever-greater sources of data from within the car.

Of course understanding which services have the greatest potential and which are best positioned to take advantage of these changes in the market is no easy task. To provide a more complete picture of the connected mobility services marketplace and assess the commercial potential of services such as connected roadside assistance, leasing, insurance, car pooling and sharing, road user charging and navigation, we have published a Connected Mobility Global Forecast. The report is based around a quantitative analysis and market model to 2020 for 14 connected car services. You can download the free abstract here.

Connectivity has already moved down in the car market from an aspirational proposition to an essential part of the OEM value proposition. A similar transformation throughout other mobility market has already begun.

To learn more about Connected Mobility, review our in-depth market research reports on Connected Vehicles