No sooner than I had written my last blog about the number of connected things and wondered out loud (if you read a blog to yourself, does it make a sound?) what the high number of predicted cars was about.
Well, here is one car makers thoughts;
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/sap-partners-vw-and-shell-to-build-connected-car-apps/2014/11/11
being developed with Shell and Volkswagen, the ultimate goal is to make Shell the preferred fueling station for owners of Volkswagen vehicles, says Nils Herzberg, SAP’s senior vice president for industry solutions. As part of that effort, the three companies plan to co-develop everything from customer loyalty to monitoring applications that track the performance of Volkswagen vehicles between stops for fuel.
Its a wee bit technical, so here is the tl;dr…..
VW is going to connect their cars to computers in the cloud. They are going to log each car’s performance and fuel efficiency and thus predict (better with AI no doubt) when it needs a service, and not only when it needs a service, but what parts it will need for that service.
They are going to monetize it (and lets not be shy here, the IoT is ALL about extracting money from everyone) by enticing VW drivers to fuel up their cars at Shell servos. (Gas stations for our American readers).
They are going to make it worth the owners effort by giving them live traffic data for the route they are traveling.
VW (and Shell?) expect to add around 500 programmers to help make this happen.
IoT is all about Big data, AI, Big dollars, and lots of other stuff.
EDIT: Before this blog was published I read another use of a connected car.
Pothole reporting.
Sensors in the car detect major bumps and the GPS can pinpoint its location.
The data is then AI’ed (is that even a word?) and you can see how easy it would be tell if a bunch of cars all report the same bump in the same location on the same day, there is a problem. Get someone out there to look at it. Now thats pretty cool.
