Burgeoning EV Market Lacks Data Standardization As OEMs Go It Alone

There’s a moment in most innovation waves where standardization becomes the missing step to reaching mass-market penetration. It’s why the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was formed after World War II to set uniform industrial specs, and it’s no different for electric vehicles (EVs) — a technological Babel in need of unification.

Hemant Sikaria, CEO and co-founder of connected EV platform Sibros Technologies, said the lack of standardization between automakers is impeding advancements in an industry that has ringing support from U.S. drivers to the White House — and across the connected economy.

Asked to choose the one thing that needs to happen for EVs to achieve their full connected potential, Sikaria told PYMNTS it is “standardization of interfaces between the vehicle and the cloud, as well as between the automakers’ cloud and the rest of the world, so that if a third-party application is developed, it can be run on multiple different automakers’ systems.”

He likened that scenario to what’s happened in computing and the rise of the USB-C connector that’s made linking Macs and PCs simple after decades of competing data port standards.

“Now laptops, phones, everything’s using the same standard now,” he said. “There’s agreement on that, and that itself has taken more than a decade. Imagine doing this for vehicles. It’s a lot harder, there’s a lot more components in play, but also I think it would help the industry move a lot faster and be able to innovate a lot faster.”

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A Driving Need for Data

Nodding to the fact that EVs not only come from competing automakers, but their individual components do as well, Sikaria — a former Tesla engineer — said data collection is one of the key areas around which EV firmware and cloud data standards should form now.

How and when that data collection happens is another matter, however.

“A typical vehicle today, a nonautonomous vehicle with no cameras, will still generate on the order of terabytes of data per month, and 99% of that data is not useful,” he said.

He said, for example, that “it doesn’t make sense to collect charging information when the vehicle is driving. It doesn’t make sense to collect driving related metrics when the vehicle is charging. But because of how it’s set up and what we see with automakers, they’re collecting all that data at a very low frequency all the time.”

That amount of data is simply too unwieldy to yield useful insights fast. That makes EV data an area in which standardization could fuel innovation in a big way, paving the path for over-the-air firmware updates and other upgrades that could be done digitally at scale.

Data streams from EVs that double as rolling connected digital wallets heighten data security issues for EVs, but with robust protections in place, the data that connected EVs can supply promise to create better versions of vehicles, from passenger cars to trucks and scooters.

“Once this data comes up to the cloud, then we can run more analytics on it,” he said. “We can use that for debugging failures in the field. We can send out a new data campaign to an entire fleet and ask specific data to be collected from [certain] vehicles.”

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Imagine If…

What becomes clear is that for EVs to scale and eventually displace the internal combustion vehicles we’re dependent on now, tighter standards around interoperability and using the right data can move the whole conversation miles ahead.

For example, Sikaria noted what can be gained from some fairly obvious (and easy) upgrades. Data on a vehicle’s position, for instance, could be put to good use for traffic analysis and setting tolls.

“At peak times when a vehicle goes through a bridge, there’s no tunnel or gate that you go through,” he said. “It just knows that you’ve crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and you’ve crossed it at rush hour, and you’re going to get charged $6 versus if you’re not going at rush hour, maybe the cost is only $2.”

Flush with its recent Series B funding round of $70 million from “strategic investors,” including Google and Qualcomm along with several automotive venture capital firms, Sibros is angling to be the standard bearer of EV data standardization with its over-the-air platform for EV data and diagnostics.

“We’re seeing a lot of traction across the globe, and we do think that this trend will continue as more investments go into clean tech because clean tech and EVs are enabled by connected vehicle technology,” Sikaria said. “There’s a lot of software in these vehicles. There’s a lot of data that can be collected to improve the service, and it makes our platform that more valuable.”

“There’ll be a lot of players in our space,” he added. “Someone has to standardize.”

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