Digitisation, increasing automation, and new business models have revolutionised the automotive industry, giving rise to disruptive technology-driven trends. According to a recent report by McKinsey & Company. The industry is now “ripe for disruption” with key interconnected trends such as autonomous driving, electrification and connectivity, expected to shape the industry over the next 15 years.
As the global leading connected vehicle services provider, we explore how our products enable automakers to easily integrate technology to ensure positive, future-proof, user experiences for their drivers, and asked our product specialists to give their predictions regarding our rapidly changing industries for the year ahead.
Electrification
According to Deloitte, most cars are parked 90-95 per cent of the time, meaning they do not need to charge every day. Households with off-street parking, and those using slow lamppost or residential on-street chargers, can do so overnight to avoid peak periods.
Ganesh Sivalingam, Head of Data Science: “This year, we expect to see continued growth in all forms of EV charging, including local authorities installing further on-street, low-powered charging, typically used for overnight or ‘base’ charging, which will enable EV ownership for drivers without off-street parking. Parkopedia is investigating ways in which machine learning can be used to improve the user experience of EV ownership, from predicting the availability of charging points to detecting faulty ones."
The current EV driver experience is poor due to low quality of data and fragmentation across multiple charging services. With the EV industry growing substantially, the existing and future parking and charging technologies need to work together to better cater for future demand and deliver the best user experience to the driver if we are to be successful in this transition. Late last year we launched our ‘Park and Charge’ product, which utilises our comprehensive experience within parking and automotive to bridge the gap between the two industries for the connected drivers on the roads today.
Adam Woolway, Head of EV: “Charging & parking are inherently linked. As we look to triple the amount of charging points in Europe over the next 10 years, more 'public' charging points will be installed on private ground. This adds a whole level of complexity to an already difficult user journey involving barriers, restrictions, fines, time limits, floor levels and more. The data and transaction providers underpinning this user journey need to provide a full picture to the driver to avoid more negative EV driver user experiences.”
Connectivity
Continually evolving to meet driver demands and ensure seamless user experiences, in-car technology is the driving force behind the evolution of vehicles from a method of transportation to a piece of personal technology and increasingly as a digital wallet.
Last year, we also announced an extension to our existing market-leading parking payment platform to include additional vehicle-centric services such as EV charging, fuelling and tolling payments. Simplifying how drivers make their vehicle-based purchases, and solving the time-consuming and expensive task for automakers of aggregating a large number of suppliers and payment providers into a single, integrated payment platform with single sign-on capability for drivers.
Markus Leyrer, Product Manager, Payments: "For a prosperous future of in-car commerce in the next few years, it is crucial for automakers to overcome the merchant fragmentation across their key markets, provide secure and convenient payment options and incentivise driver adoption with an intuitive user experience. Parkopedia is confident that our offering for reducing merchant fragmentation with a sophisticated single sign-on solution, and by providing seamless integrations for compelling digital transaction services with future-proof payment solutions, we are more than ready to support automakers on their journey to scaling in-car commerce.”
Autonomous
More and more parking is moving indoors to maximise ground-area usage, however, by blocking the line of sight to satellites, navigation via GPS is lost. An indoor navigation service can guide drivers to the most likely available spot - minimising overall journey times by optimising a multi-modal route planning, navigating drivers to ‘hidden’ EV charging stations, and enable Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and convenience services of the future, such as find-my-car applications through to Automated Valet Parking (AVP) use cases.
Brian Holt, Head of HD Maps: “This year, our team of in-house software developers will continue to create the highly detailed indoor maps needed to deliver parking or charging solutions for autonomous cars. Following the successful delivery of our AVP project in 2020, we have already proven that vehicles can precisely locate themselves using artificial landmarks inside a centimeter-accurate map of a parking facility without access to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). By replicating the AVP demo using natural landmarks such as columns, road markings and signs, we are now showcasing that the same result can be achieved without requiring any modification to the car parking infrastructure itself, or indeed the vehicle. We are bringing the 'blue dot' navigation experience that we are so familiar with outdoors, indoors. The days of getting lost in a car park, or not being able to find your car again will finally be gone!”
Made possible by Indoor maps, AVP has the potential to improve efficiency and reduce stress, emissions and time wasted on parking, with benefits such as allowing a driver to be dropped off in front of a car park or their final destination, with the vehicle then autonomously parking itself - avoiding unnecessary congestion and pollution through real-time dissemination of parking space availability to connected autonomous vehicles. AVP can also improve safety as drivers will no longer need to walk around poorly lit parking facilities or navigate around moving vehicles.
For automakers, AVP is seen as the catalyst for wider autonomous driving features, such as enabling EVs to be autonomously charged or vehicles to be washed and serviced, then automatically returned to a parking spot that is convenient for the driver to find.
During 2022, Parkopedia will continue to support automakers in enabling their drivers to find and pay for parking, EV charging, fuelling and tolls in more locations than ever before, while also continuing to develop highly detailed parking maps and corresponding algorithms to help drivers and self-driving vehicles navigate to an open parking or charging space indoors.
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