By Louisa Kiwana and Karen Foster
The future holds a great promise for allowing intelligent mobility to take hold in our lives. Cheaper, efficient and creatively connected methods of transportation will mean we can choose between the best of what’s on offer. The future will also see Intelligent Mobility transcend from ‘a new way of doing things’, to ‘just the way we do things’.
Mobile devices are a now a necessity for most of us planning a journey, so much so, that we have, on average, three to five apps installed on our phones relating to transport and journey planning alone. As developments in Intelligent Mobility continue to positively disrupt the way we do things, consumers will look towards brands and services to take a proactive approach in providing personalised and improved services, whilst on the move.
Developments in Sentiment Mapping, for instance will soon allow social media and crowd-based applications to monitor the location, transport method, emotions of commuters in real-time – taking stock of personal preferences, to provide preferred routes and potential safety hazards.
There are several innovations like Sentiment Mapping in the development pipeline that aim to create a consciously revolutionised transport from a series of separate journeys to an integrated, reactive, intelligent, mobility system driven in part by technology and in part by a desire for personalised services.
As our devices become more connected, they will also become more personal
Intelligent Mobility is an exciting intersection between traditional transport and new products and services relating to the ‘Internet of Things’. However, on this view, the Internet of Things exposes the value of our personal data and privacy for what it is: a characteristic of the industrial age.
Many of us often ‘allow access’ to our personal information on our iOS or familiar sites and apps such as Facebook, Google Maps and LinkedIn. Some of us also release access to our personal information and location, to those we don’t know, in exchange for efficiency and access to products.
Since data will ultimately be the fuel that feeds Intelligent Mobility, it’ll be interesting to watch the trade-off between privacy and convenience, especially whilst we’re on the move.
How much of our personal information are we willing to trade for cost saving and convenience?
Back in 2005, MM-Eye played a part in the pilot for the first ‘little black box’ telematics unit, for one of the UK’s leading car insurance providers. The customer response to ‘tattle tale’ telematics at the time was a resounding ‘no way’. The imposed restrictions on speed, time, mileage and invasion of privacy made this an obviously bad idea.
However, ten years on, smartphone ownership in the UK has leaped from 1.5% to 72%, with car insurers responsively offering ‘self-install’ devices and smartphone apps. With so much of our information now tracked on our mobile phones, there’s no doubt that we have become desensitised to the fact that what we do is always being watched. Our smartphones are the ultimate little black box.
Tom Ellis of Gocompare, the insurance comparison website, predicts that in another 10 years’ time, telematics will be a standard for all car drivers. So in the way ‘smartphones’ have simply become ‘phones’, will access to our personal data just be part of living life in the information age?
Intelligent Mobility is already revolutionising our approach to challenges traditionally beset the transport sector, and also holds the key to more user-focused needs, integrated transportation methods and global resource demands. Yet, it’s widely acknowledged that intelligent vehicles and transport systems require detailed real-time information to understand and adapt to changing conditions – designed for our benefit.
Everywhere we travel now we leave a digital trail. Our smartphones inform local stations, traffic sensors detect our vehicle at traffic lights, and Oyster cards calculate average journey times as we pass by; and this data is just the tip of the iceberg of the digital information available.
The transport sector is at the beginning of a period of significant disruption, with new technologies, products and services fundamentally shifting customer expectations and opportunities in mobility. The market for Intelligent Mobility is rapidly developing, as customers, authorities and businesses address the major opportunities and improving how we move around.
From a consumer experience perspective, it will be interesting to witness where consumers draw the line between autonomy and the convenience of connected technology. Particularly as we see access to our personal information – like that of ‘the little black box’– as a creation of the modern age, and just the way we do things.
Louisa Kiwana is Business & Strategy Manager at MM-Eye.
Karen Foster is Research Executive at MM-Eye.
