This week’s episode of the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast features Ryan Robinson, Automotive Research Leader at Deloitte! There, he’s focused on sharing insights and expanding the conversation around key trends in the automotive industry. Similar to Mike Wall from IHS Markit, we’ve referenced Deloitte’s work in automotive research over the last few months and Ryan is one of the leaders of their operation.
Give the episode a listen for yourself, or dive into a selection of highlights from our interview below. As always, be sure to subscribe to stay tuned for future episodes!
Ryan on Deloitte’s consumer research on autonomous vehicles
Scot: Here on the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we have a framework where we talk about the four big changes coming to vehicles. So we have changing ownership, connected car, EV and AV. I’ll let you spin the wheel and pick your favorite topic; we'd love to hear your thoughts on those.
Ryan: Sure! We can dig into say the autonomous space first. We do a global consumer survey every year. This past year we talked to about 25,000 consumers, covering off on 20 different countries, and we asked them a variety of questions around some of these, what you might call the CASE technologies, right? And in terms of the autonomous space, something very strange is happening. I think on the one hand, when you see technologies coming into view for the consumer: as they get more information about them, they get more comfortable with them and you tend to see consumers really gravitate towards them. And our data is telling us something quite different. And we think it's got a lot to do with the small number of accidents involving autonomous vehicles in the last 18 months to two years.
Considering that we're in a space where the ubiquity of social media and the echo chambers that get created around some of these topics, it doesn't take very many of these sometimes very tragic incidents to really have a negative impact on the consumer psyche overall, relative to that technology. So as far as the percentage of consumers that don't think the technology is going to be safe, it's actually flattened off year over year from where we were last year. So I think it's indicative of a bit of a cooling trend. The consumers are really taken a second thought on this, on this technology and whether or not they're really bought in going forward.
Ryan on the current state and future of electric vehicles
Scot: So how about electric vehicles? Do you see that kind of being closer on the horizon?
Ryan: Yeah, I mean, on the other side of the technology coin is electrification. We look at it as a bit of a spectrum. Electrification could mean anything from hybrid to kind of full battery electric. I think it's a lot closer in terms of when we're going to start to see a lot of that critical mass getting achieved. But it's not going to be a rising tide lifts all boats kind of scenario, if you talk about it from a geographic standpoint. Certainly markets like China are very aggressively following a path that will take them to critical mass of electrified or electrified vehicles a lot faster than we're going to see here in North America.And that's got a lot to do with the fact that they're very concerned about things like urban pollution.
And beyond that, it's a very distinct decision that's being made to be a global leader on the next generation of mobility. I think that you know, Europe's gonna is starting to follow pretty quickly in the wake of the Dieselgate scandal. There was a desire on the automaker front to rebrand yourself away from diesel technology. And the only forward-looking kind of propulsion technology that was in view at the time was electric vehicles. So I think that we're seeing a lot of that in North America.
We're still we're still lagging behind for a number of reasons that range from not quite as strict a policy on environmental regulations to what amounts to be still a relatively low fuel price environment. And also the type of vehicles that that we like to drive here are keeping us in that kind of combustion engine story for a little bit longer.
Ryan on connected cars and a revenue stream of consumer data
Scot: The last topic is connected car. There's the tactical “I wanna use my phone to access my car and get data from my car” but then there's kind of also taking that to the next level where that data starts to feed into city planning and those kinds of things. What do you think about the connected cars impact?
Ryan: The connected car is coming. I think it's a really interesting topic because on the one hand it's a question of trust, right? You have consumers that are telling us they're very concerned with things like data privacy, data security, even things to do with personal safety around connected vehicles is a large topic for consumers right now. And on the other hand, you have manufacturers and other types of industry stakeholders that are looking for different ways to monetize the mobility experience. If we think that we are at some point and we can debate the timelines, but at some point we're moving we're moving into a new business model where we're not necessarily just bolting cars together and selling them to end consumers.
You have to figure out what's the next revenue stream; connected cars and the data being generated off those cars. That can be very valuable for companies in terms of just trying to take waste out of their own production system. There's applications for predictive maintenance and all of the things that come along with that. There's also what you talked about in terms of how it can feed into a smart connected urban environment or a smart city. We've still got consumer concern. We've still got the traditional stakeholders that really are coming to the realization that it may not be in their set of core competencies to figure out how to do this going forward.
That's one of the reasons why we're seeing a lot of the partnerships, a lot of strategic alliances that are cropping up in the industry. Some of the M&A activity and some of the investments that are being made in startups, because it's a different skill set to be able to figure out what to do with this data.
We here at Spiffy were thrilled to have Ryan as a guest on the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. It was an honor to have such another informed researcher in the automotive industry on the podcast and we hope there is a lot of information to learn from!
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