How Collaboration is Defining the Future of the Connected Car

By Jonas Ydkvist

How Collaboration is Defining the Future of the Connected Car

The growing importance of the connected car has prompted a rethinking of how suppliers can not only work together but also with car makers to create a solution that embraces their individual core competencies to deliver a superior solution. Through seamless collaboration Ericsson, AT&T, and Volvo Cars are making the next generation connected car a reality. 

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Imagine a world where road status data collected by cars is shared with other road users and with local authorities through a connected car cloud: A world where the benefits of anonymized data-sharing support convenience and life-saving services while helping to contribute to a better society. Volvo Cars is working on realising such a future scenario.

Volvo Cars is making rapid progress. In the globally launched Sensus Cloud, Volvo Cars connects with the driver for the duration of the car’s lifetime. Software and applications are updated remotely, interfaces towards repair shops and dealers enables the hassle-free car ownership. New safety features can be deployed automatically where the car receives this new programming information on an unsolicited basis from the cloud.

In early March, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Volvo and Ericsson showed how they are taking the connected car to the next level by not only offering a superior driving and ownership experience, but by demonstrating how they are saving lives. To do this, Volvo is working not only to connect the car and the driver, but to connect the complete environment around the car including; pedestrians, cyclists, roads and road authorities or the complete transportation system. Volvo believes that their zero vision of no fatalities or major injuries in new Volvo cars by 2020 will become a reality.

Watch the Road Status technology film: 

159530_Slippery_Road_Alert_technology_by_Volvo_Cars

Supplier relations within the automotive industry have typically been highly adversarial and competitive. Car makers often pit their suppliers against each other to compete on the basis of price and quality.

In a recent report from Strategy Analytics, "How Collaboration is Defining the Future of the Connected Car", Associate Director Automotive Multimedia & Communications Service Roger Lanctot, explains how the growing importance of the connected car has prompted a rethinking of how suppliers can not only work together but also with car makers to create a solution that embraces their individual core competencies to deliver a superior solution. Through seamless collaboration Ericsson, AT&T, and Volvo Cars are making the next generation connected car and connected devices a reality.

This is a very good example of what Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster predicted regarding Big Data in their HBR article "Strategy and the New Economics of Information" in 1997. This explosion in connectivity is the latest—and, for business strategists, the most important—wave in the information revolution. The new economics of information will precipitate changes in the structure of entire industries and in the ways companies compete. And collaborate.

Want to read more? Zooma has previously predicted that online commerce is going to be an integral part of the car industry’s approach going forward: "The automotive industry takes a leap of faith".

Jonas Ydkvist
Brand Strategist at Zooma, 2014 - 2016
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