No Killer Connected Car App

Conferences often have a turning point where attendees realize they have learned something profound or captured a kernel of valuable insight that will justify the time and expense of attending and expiate the guilt of having a little fun away from the office.  This is why speakers normally have a conclusion slide to provide a list of takeaways and validate their value-added contribution.

Sometimes, though, conferences have a different kind of turning point - when attendees wonder why they bothered to come in the first place.  This happened to me yesterday at the Vehicle Connectivity Workshop put on by the Telecommunication Industry Association.

Don't get me wrong.  All the right people were at the event and they all had the opportunity to share their visions of vehicle connectivity and all the challenges and opportunities that come with that.  In fact, I may have learned more from my private conversations away from the stage than I did from the prepared remarks of the speakers.

But the gathering nearly ground to halt when the moderator asked a panel of academic researchers what the "killer app" was for the connected car.  It appeared that there wasn't one.

By killer app, the speaker appeared to be leaning toward something revenue producing, but all answers were welcomed.  The panelists, which included representatives from the Virginia Tech Transport Institute, University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center and Texas A&M Transportation Institute, struggled to come up with anything compelling.

There is no doubt that vehicle connectivity will mitigate vehicle emissions and congestion, reduce fuel consumption, and allow collisions to be avoided, but maybe these applications were either too obvious or not regarded as things that consumers would actually pay for.  Connectivity also enables automatic crash notification and weather reports and Pandora, Spotify and Wi-Fi.  About the only thing the three panelists could agree on was that drivers universally want other drivers to know that they are there.

Peter Sweatman, who overseas the Mcity testing grounds for UofM said that motorcyclists want drivers of cars and trucks to know of their presence just as truck drivers want car drivers to know of their presence on the road.  It is not surprising Sweatman would nominate let's-call-it presence enunciation as a killer app since he is overseeing the largest V2V test deployment possibly in the world.  The only thing the currently proposed V2V module in the U.S. does is announce: "Here I am."  Incessantly. 

And that is after 16 years of development.  It MUST be a pretty important message.

In the future, cars will be expected to aggregate dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of these messages into a coherent decision-making process that might include warnings to the driver or emergency braking.

Here-I-am is intended to be a life-saving, collision avoiding communication happening in milliseconds and without driver intervention.  The need for this message marks the primary difference between driving a car and piloting any other kind of vehicle or vessel.  There is no margin for error in the car.  Decisions must be made in milliseconds and, very likely, beyond the control of the driver.

So maybe that simple message IS the killer app - the new killer app for connected cars.  Will we pay for that?  We'll soon find out.  The US Department of Transportation is expected to recommend that rule-making proceed toward a mandate before the end of 2015.  So that was a reasonable takeaway from the TIA event.