Will Cars Look like Whales?

Governments around the world are increasingly obsessed with mandating hardware devices to be built into or attached to cars. If this keeps up, cars are going to start looking like barnacled old whales.

Devices add cost and weight and, in some instances, vastly disrupt supply chains, design cycles and research and development programs. Europe’s eCall and Brazil’s Contran 245 mandates are but two examples of a series of initiatives conceived with the best of intentions that have cost car makers and their suppliers millions of dollars to no purpose.

In Europe, eCall was intended as an automatic crash notification system for alerting emergency responders to accidents. Its implementation was meant to save lives, with some estimates running as high as 2,000 saved lives per year.

Instead, the entire time and money wasting process of defining and adopting eCall has most likely cost lives as the mandate process disrupted car makers’ own plans for ACN systems. After a decade of research, development, standards setting, testing and missed deadlines, the prospect of the first saved life is still years away.

In Brazil, Contran 245 is on a similar trajectory of study and delay. The mandated module intended for tracking and immobilization of stolen vehicles of all types was given yet another delay earlier this year of two years. No cars, trucks or motorcycles have been rescued from theft yet and are not likely to be for another three years.

In spite of the millions of wasted dollars (Reals) and development in Brazil, the Contran 245 program has been successful in two ways. It has attracted significant investment to the rapidly growing Brazilian automotive market (including acquisitions such as Michelin’s purchase of Sascar); and the battle to control the market for embedded modules helped drive down the cost of connectivity hardware globally.

But the ongoing delays in Brazil highlight the shortcomings of the government mandate process. Two years ago, after multiple delays in adoption of the Contran 245 mandate, suppliers notified car companies that they would have to either buy up all the telecom modules that they estimated they would need or they would have to redesign their connectivity devices.

What happened in Brazil was that the delay was so long that suppliers were no longer making the relevant devices. This is happening in Europe as well where eCall was conceived for 2G networks which are now slowly but surely being switched off on the periphery of Europe and which, by the time of implementation, may no longer make sense for an emergency response system.

In an excellent, if a little long, presentation at Insurance Telematics in Chicago last week Cyril Zeller, vice president of global telematics for module maker Telit, detailed the growing roster of mandated vehicle connectivity programs. His list included:

BJ Tolling Auto – 2013 – Netherlands

eCall – 2017 – Europe

Era Glonass – 2015 – Russia

Denatran (Contran 245) – 2016 - Brazil

Monti’s Law – 2012 – Italy

Green Tax – 2013/15 – France/Europe

The U.S. is currently considering mandating a hardware module to enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication. And even the United Nations is considering a global eCall implementation scheme.

Modules for taxation are also in the mix throughout the world. The emergence of alternative fuel vehicles is threatening the gas tax-based highway infrastructure maintenance funding process in the U.S. Individual states led by Oregon are trialing mileage-based taxing schemes managed by installed modules. Even the U.S. Congress has taken up this possibility.

It is increasingly clear that something has got to give. The process of mandating modules is inevitably undermined by the pace of technological advance and market forces. Mandated devices predictably cost millions of dollars to standardize, prototype, test and adopt and invariably end up costing consumers and compromising the integrity and security of the vehicles upon which they are installed.

This week we learn of General Motors’ plans to deploy V2V modules on the 2017 Cadillac CTS. Yet even as it announces its intention to add these devices to these cars, GM acknowledges they will offer little or no value to consumers.

A technology with no proven consumer value would never have been added to a vehicle at the “Old GM” where pennies were pinched. GM’s decision to implement V2V is clearly political, not practical. GM is attempting to both lead the industry and score points with an unhappy regulator: NHTSA. There is no other explanation for adding worthless cost and weight to an already expensive car.

The common thread to most future vehicle connections, with the exception of some RF-based tolling devices, is the telecom module. Regulators obsessed with mandates and modules will be better served by seeking to fit their connectivity requirements – protocols, codes, algorithms, prioritization schemes – into existing wireless standards development activities. For cars, this means focusing on 5G.

By using existing wireless standards regulators will allow consumers to fulfill the connectivity requirements with inexpensive aftermarket devices or their own wireless phones or via embedded telecom modules already built into their cars. Cars like whales are better off unbarnacled.