Why The Global Car Industry As We Know It Is All But Dead

Why The Global Car Industry As We Know It Is All But Dead
B&T Magazine
By B&T Magazine



A hundred years of certainty is coming to a close in the automotive industry. Digital disruption means the days when the sector created competitive advantage mainly through engineering excellence are over.

That is the key insight from a new IBM report into the sector which cautions that old certainties and strategies simply won’t work in future. The report is not so much a study current industry practice, as the collected wisdom of about 20 senior self driving car specialists – people who’s job it is to sit around, think hard and sweat the details.

According to IBM, “The “car of the future” will be increasingly intelligent, inter-connected and instrumented and will communicate, socialise and collaborate with other vehicles, traffic lights, parking bays and retailers.”

Further more the company suggests that connected cars will bring forth an array of digital services created out of the vast amounts of data this connectivity will unleash.

The report suggests that the connected car is part of a wider “system of systems”, with the potential to create a dazzling array of new digital services.  Manufacturers will leverage IoT enabling technologies, such as sensors, analytics, big data, natural language processing and cloud computing.

On the analytics front alone the authors say that modern cars are underpinned by a million lines of code, producing up to 25GB data per hour.

“The connected car is literally a big data in motion problem.”

And of course there is the obligatory (and still sensible) concession to security.

According to Dirk Wollschlaeger, general manager, IBM Automotive Industry, “Security is the foundation to everything in the IoT. This becomes particularly apparent with the connected car. Just like health insurance, you have to be sure that you are adequately covered, otherwise the consequences can be disastrous.”

This article originally appeared on B&T’s sister site www.which-50.com




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