Over the last few months there has been an increasing focus from key M2M stakeholders on pursuing the connected car market in a more meaningful way. Earlier this year AT&T launched its Drive Platform (in conjunction with the likes of Amdocs, Ericsson and Jasper Wireless) and Drive Studio lab. Ericsson has particularly been pushing the automotive angle with its Connected Vehicle Cloud. This is on top of initiatives such as the Velocity platform from Sprint and Aeris Communications.
There has also been a lot of speculation recently about the role of Apple or Google. In March Apple officially launched its CarPlay product, hot on the heels of Google’s Open Auto Alliance which was announced in January 2014. It is currently an open question in the automotive M2M sector whether these proprietary systems will start to dominate, or whether the automotive sector will be able to support a more generic interface, for instance through initiatives such as MirrorLink, or the GENIVI alliance.
From the automotive manufacturers, there has been an increasing focus with regular announcements coming forth about plans for embedding connectivity into greater proportions of new vehicles. With all of this interest in the connected car, Machina Research, on behalf of Vodafone, has undertaken an assessment of the relative degrees of connectedness of the world’s automobile manufacturers.
Based on Machina Research’s criteria, BMW came out as the world’s most connected manufacturer. It has a market leading proposition in the form of Connected Drive and has made some significant commitments to deploying connectivity across its range of vehicles. It has also been exploring a number of interesting alternative business models such as the DriveNow initiative. GM comes second on the back of its well-established OnStar platform as well as significant recent commitments to implement LTE across its range. Ford is third, courtesy of its scale and increasing refocusing of strategy on embedded connectivity.
While Audi ships only limited volumes of vehicles it has, in many ways, taken a leadership position in terms of approach, with features such as the WiFi Hotspot service. Chrysler (including Dodge and Jeep) takes position five, courtesy of the strong showing of its Uconnect platform.
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The full list of top 10 connected car manufacturers is as follows:
- BMW
- GM
- Ford
- Audi
- Chrysler
- Mercedes-Benz
- Tesla
- Toyota
- VW
- Honda
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Tesla and Mercedes Benz make strong showings in the ranking due to the relative importance (criticality in the case of Tesla) of connectivity to their overall product offering. Toyota, VW and Honda round out the top 10, courtesy of large volumes and greater focus on the connected car, such as VW’s launch of the Car-Net solution in 2014.
To measure the degree of connectedness of the different automotive OEMs and subsequently rank them, Machina Research identified a set of weighted connectivity criteria which characterise the quantitative and qualitative features of the connected car today and in the coming years. These criteria included:
- Percentage of global vehicle car sales with embedded connectivity
- Percentage of global vehicle car sales with embedded LTE connectivity
- Purpose of embedded connectivity
- Range of services and features available through the vehicle platform
- ‘Openness’ of the vehicle platform in terms of application development and management
- Levels of integration between the vehicle platform and e.g. mobile applications, other devices, web portal management, and data management
- Level of innovation enabled and pursued through connectivity for such areas as driving and ownership
- Membership of organisations such as the Connected Car Consortium, GENIVI, OAA, etc.
With over 25 criteria assessed for each automotive OEM and marque, Machina Research applied a weighting to each category according to their importance. Broadly speaking a 40/60 split was applied between quantitative and qualitative criteria. The greatest priority was given to those criteria that were considered most important: current and future numbers of connected cars, proportion of vehicles connected, and range of services provided.
Matt Hatton – Director, Machina Research
