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Platform provider aims to connect half a million cars in Sweden; has half an eye on Canada, Australia.
While car makers are busy cramming infotainment systems and as many sensors as possible into their latest models, it is operators that actually hold the key to the connected car services that drivers will come to rely on.
This is what software platform provider Springworks thinks, anyway. The Swedish company’s platform is being used by Sweden’s incumbent Telia for its Sense service, which takes the form of an LTE dongle that plugs into a car’s on-board diagnostics (OBD) port, which have been mandatory on cars sold in Europe since 2001.
The dongle turns an ordinary car into a connected car, able to send telematics data to any company that wants it, including smartphone app makers, insurers, and mechanics, among others. It also works as an in-car WiFi hotspot.
Developing and sourcing an OBD dongle is the relatively easy part though, the hard part is building the service ecosystem around it, and Springworks argues that this is where operators come into their own.
"We needed a trusted partner to cater to the needs of the user and build, maintain and orchestrate the local ecosystem," explained Magnus Melander, sales and marketing director at Springworks, to Total Telecom this week.
"That’s why we decided to go to operators, it is a perfect match for them," he said.
Telia has been selling Sense to car owners in Sweden since the beginning of November, and has signed up the country’s biggest car-servicing company to the platform. The operator could potentially add any kind of service provider, Melander, said, not just insurers, but also advertisers, car sellers, and roadside assistance providers, to name a few.
Furthermore, because the OBD dongle connects to its LTE network, Telia is also starting to use the data it generates to measure the quality of its mobile network.
"Operators in general have always said ‘we love IoT or M2M but we’re not only doing connectivity’. We think we are a great answer to what operators actually could do or should do," Melander said, which is put themselves in the middle of the ecosystem.
Meanwhile, much attention is given to the cross-border capabilities of connected car services, but Melander claims a national rather international approach is better.
"Probably 90% of all the services the driver wants are actually national, and car ownership is quite different country-by-country, from a cultural point of view, from a legal point of view and so forth," he said.
This plays to telcos’ strengths, he claimed, because they are better than car makers at tailoring their businesses to address national markets, particularly when it comes to engaging with local ecosystem partners, like insurers and mechanics. Telcos also have a closer relationship with end users, whereas a car owner might only contact their car maker once per year.
"So we decided to roll out country-by-country," Melander said.
Springworks has set a target of connecting half a million cars in Sweden, and Melander is starting to look further afield. As well as looking at Western Europe, he has also recently visited Canada and Australia.
"Hopefully we’ll be able to announce two more customers soon," he said.
