Evgeny Klochikhin, Founder & CEO, Sheeva, part of the Techstars – Smart Mobility Program

The Future of Connected Mobility and Customer Engagement

Recent years have seen the rapid rise of mobility-as-a-service initiatives including car sharing, electric scooters, bikes, ride sharing, and others.

Yet, private cars remain one of the main modes of transportation ranging between 62% of daily trips in the UK and 82% in the US.  This situation begs for increased efficiency of the driving experiences, in response to climate change and consumer demands.

One approach is to promote vehicle electrification thus reducing pollution directly produced by the vehicles. The other side of the solution is to promote more efficient driver experiences with connected mobility, particularly enabled by 5G speeds, thus reducing traffic congestion and improving overall experience of owning the car.

Coronavirus offers additional incentives to roll out such programs as soon as possible. The core metric guiding these developments – that may have been largely overlooked in the past – is NOT customer adoption (e.g. downloading the vehicle-branded app and rarely using it for maintenance checkups) but customer engagement, i.e. making sure that consumers get the benefits of enabled connected services in their everyday driving experience.

That is why, automated fueling, parking, tolls, electric vehicle charging, and other contactless in-car payments and navigation present the core opportunity to tackle both coronavirus-related concerns and longer-term sustainability and circular economy vision.