Connected Car is a broad category, encompassing a huge range of hardware & software technologies, systems, and components – both inside and outside of the vehicle. Consequently, Connected Car promises to be tremendously disruptive to Automotive – chiefly due to the number of gaps & opportunities created for new business models to transform and disrupt.
Connected Car is also driving business dynamics – efficiency, opportunity, differentiation, and disruption – to create a rich tapestry of creation, competition, and innovation. OEM's, Tier 1's, Dealer Groups, and Fleets are now in a position to reconsider and re-engineer their businesses from top to bottom. Existing industry leaders are also faced with new competitors, who are disrupting the industry to take business away from them.
Primary examples are Tesla, Rivian, Canoo and others on the OEM side; new Mobility entrants like Wunder, RIdecell, Lyft, and Uber on the Fleet side; new startups providing cybersecurity like Karamba, GuardKnox, Upstream, plus Tier 1’s like APTIV; OTA solutions like Sibros, and Tier 1’s like Harman, Bosch, and Continental; battery and charging technologies like QuantumScape, ProLigium, Enevate, and ChargePoint as well as tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google threatening all aspects of vehicle operation and ownership.
It's an exciting and potentially perilous time for incumbents and they have some very challenging calls to make about their next business moves and technology investments.
To decide these complex business decisions to best advantage and choose the optimal area of monetization focus, motormindz recommends consideration of the following key questions:
• Efficiency (Power of Suppliers): Where do large costs exist in your current ecosystem and supply chain, that might be greatly affected through the application of new technologies?
• Opportunity (Power of Customers): Where do significant consumer "pain points" exist in the experiences you provide, and can new technologies be used to greatly reduce these? What is the cost of doing nothing?
• Differentiation (Threat of Substitutes): Where do you have existing technology skills, products, and/or capabilities that can be used to compete more effectively or that can be exploited by competitors?
• Disruption (New Entrants): Where do gaps in offerings, skills, products, and services offered by the market in total exist that could be used as disruption points for you, your competitors, and/or new entrants? How can you capitalize on them? How must you defend against them?
Explorations of each of these approaches can be seen in the latest initiatives being explored by key market players. And, while it’s too early to conclude if any of these will ultimately succeed, they serve as real-world examples of the kind of thinking industry players should be applying: