Robin Chase on Why Car Data Wants To Be Free
Robin Chase is the founder and former CEO of Zipcar, thinks that the strnaglehold that car manufacturers have on car data makes no sense:
Current federal law requires annual emissions and safety inspections for all cars. A mechanic plugs an electronic reader into what’s known as the onboard diagnostic unit, a computer that sits under your dashboard, monitoring data on acceleration, emissions, fuel levels and engine problems. The mechanic can then download the data to his own computer and analyze it.
Because carmakers believe such diagnostic data to be their property, much of it is accessible only by the manufacturer and authorized dealers and their mechanics. And even then, only a small amount of the data is available — most cars’ computers don’t store data, they only monitor it. Though newer Toyotas have data recorders that gather information in the moments before an air bag is deployed, the carmaker has been frustratingly vague about what kind of data is collected (other manufacturers have been more forthcoming).
But what if a car’s entire data stream was made available to drivers in real time? You could use, for instance, a hypothetical “analyze-my-drive” application for your smart phone to tell you when it was time to change the oil or why your “check engine” light was on. The application could tell you how many miles you were getting to the gallon, and how much yesterday’s commute cost you in time, fuel and emissions. It could even tell you, say, that your spouse’s trips to the grocery store were 20 percent more fuel-efficient than yours.
Carmakers could collect the data, too. Aberrant engine and driving behavior would leap out of the carmakers’ now-large data set, allowing them, if necessary, to conduct recalls much earlier. And, in exchange for your contribution of anonymous data, carmakers could send you driving benchmarks aggregated from your peers; then your app could tell you how your driving compares with the average of all drivers of the same car.
Having such readily accessible data streaming from your car might raise fears of a Big Brother scenario, in which carmakers would know where you are and how you are using (or misusing) your vehicle. But you would still decide whether you wanted to tap into the data, how you would use it and with whom you’d share it.
Allowing drivers and carmakers access to real-time performance data wouldn’t prevent every future mechanical failure. But it would allow carmakers and entrepreneurs to develop analytical tools to help catch developing problems in both individual cars and entire model lines. Cars would continue to break down and even cause accidents, but it wouldn’t take a Congressional hearing to figure out why.
Every car could have something like a Twitter account with a history of all of it’s actions and stats. This is the Bruce Sterline notion of a spime: dumb devices stream their internal state changes into the cosmic data stream.
Obviously this would be of benefit to all of us, and — by the way — would obviate the need for ‘black boxes’ in cars for after the fact examination of collisions or other bad driving. Of course, the publicy/privacy duynamic is deeply embedded in a context like this. People’s geographic location in their cars would need to shared in safe ways, but cars levels of emissions are supposedly regulated. It would be better to send a message to someone whose car is belching out illegal levels of smog than to find out at next year’s emission test, obviously. And people who drive dangerously, by racing through red lights or speeding, have no right to privacy in such cases. That is why we install video camera/speed sensors at dangerous intersections.
