VW car tower in Wolfsburg
The largest German car manufacturer wants to enter the mobility data space advertised by the Chancellor.
(Photo: AFP)
Berlin Angela Merkel (CDU) can rely on allies from Wolfsburg at the car summit on Tuesday evening: The largest German car manufacturer Volkswagen wants to enter the mobility data room advertised by the Chancellor. “We see this as a decisive competitive factor for Germany and are striving for direct participation,” said a group spokeswoman when asked.
“The innovation potential of comprehensive data usage is enormous,” she continued. Better decisions would also be made and even better products would be developed. “The entire economy, including us, can only benefit from this.”
The Chancellor couldn’t have said it any better. At 7 p.m., the CEOs of BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen, as well as important suppliers such as Bosch and Continental and IG Metall boss Jörg Hofmann, will join the video conference with the Federal Chancellery.
It’s about scrapping premiums and purchase premiums to cushion the weak sales in the industry. There is also talk of private aid funds for the shaky supplier industry. The Chancellor is also interested in autonomous driving, but above all she wants to unearth the last great treasure trove of data in the big data business: with the data room mobility.
The Chancellor ordered the concept that the Handelsblatt has received from the Academy for Technical Sciences – although the car manufacturers have so far shown little interest in participating in the project. At least it is now being discussed at the auto summit. As it was said from government circles, in addition to Volkswagen, Daimler is now also ready to join the company. The Stuttgart carmaker did not want to comment before the meeting in the Chancellery.
Volkswagen is already building its own data marketplace for the project. “A separate marketplace is the prerequisite for participating in higher-level platforms such as the mobility data room,” explained a spokeswoman.
By the end of March, Acatech intends to transfer the data room to a non-profit company as the carrier. Not only is Volkswagen aiming for a direct share here, which itself speaks of the transformation “towards a software-driven mobility provider”. The early activists also included Here Technologies, the data platform from Audi, BMW and Daimler; the mobility provider Free Now, in which BMW and Daimler are involved, the Deutsche Bahn AG, the German Weather Service, the Federal Highway Research Institute or the Hessian road administration Hessen mobil.
Anyone who does not want to become a direct partner can sign framework agreements for participation and data usage agreements, which Acatech intends to present at the beginning of December.
Here and Free Now implement their first business ideas
It’s about the future of all traffic: automatic displays when a train fails, traffic jams in a street or construction sites have to be bypassed, combined with alternative offers or optimized traffic control via navigation device, which can also provide forecasts.
All of this is to be managed better in the future than before on the mountains of data of the participating companies. The first ideas can be found in the data room concept to improve mobile life. The companies are already getting involved.
While preferences and movements of users on the Internet are already recorded in detail via cookies and other tracking tools and aggregated for new products and advertising, data recorded in the transport sector is still scattered and stored in a wide variety of formats – with car manufacturers, taxi companies, pooling providers, however also the train. In the future, everything should be saved in a standardized manner and made available to everyone.
The technical monitoring associations are also involved in the data room mobility through their association in order to gain access. The more software and automatic driving functions find their way into cars, and programs are updated over the air, the more TÜV, Dekra and Co. have to be able to check these parts of the vehicle.
The TÜV association calls for a “trust center” that is looked after by an independent third party and through which the auditors can access data. It is about “operational, traffic and environmental safety” as the Association of Monitoring Associations writes in a position paper.
Looking for a private operator
In fact, Acatech wants to use a tender to search for a private operator who will take over the system on July 1st. It is based on the infrastructure of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). It has a decentralized structure so that each data provider keeps their data on their own server and has control over who is allowed to use them and under what conditions.
“A good way of doing this is to have all participants certified to adhere to standards to an extent that also promotes market-based self-regulation of the data room,” says Volkswagen, pointing the way.
On October 1, 2021, the data room is to officially start its regular operation, and then 14 days later to demonstrate its skills to a wide audience at the World Telematics Congress in Hamburg. “The aim is to initially show around five use cases,” says the concept.
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