A network of connected cars

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Towards the Connected Car: networked vehicles and infrastructure

Many firms have plans to put telematics devices into every vehicle. This would allow all vehicles to be networked, providing centrally available information on traffic flows. This allows traffic lights to be better timed, and drivers to be better informed. Drivers can then move to an alternate, faster route - assuming that the overall volume of traffic is not such as to jam all routes at once.

There are only two challenges to getting these telematics services in place: privacy protection, and economics. Unless very strict privacy protection is in place, and this privacy is communicated vigorously, the connected car will only be taken up by a fraction of the population. Skymeter solves the privacy issue. And a telematics platform has a cost, typically of around a hundred dollars, which can only be justified if at least a few hundreds of dollars of services are paid for through the platform each year. By enabling vehicle-related financial transactions, Skymeter enables a sufficient dollar volume of services to justify the telematics platform.

The in-car portion of Skymeter's metering service is an open telematics platform. It can be used as such by people looking to connect cars into a network. As telematics platforms advance to the level required to run the in-car portion of Skymeter's metering software, Skymeter will offer metering as a service using whatever capable platform is available.