IoT Opportunity

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Another good example is the Ford plug-in electric vehicles, which generate several GBs of data per hour from hundreds of individual battery and engine sensors, but much of the data is processed onboard and then in-turn transmitted in bursts when the car comes in range of collection stations. This is a very effective way to use network bandwidth efficiently and reduce cost. While each and every battery pack on the car has sensors and ability to communicate, you would not want those batteries independently transmitting their data over the Internet, you need to collect and aggregate the data locally, process it, and summarize it into the context of the overall range and health of the complete vehicle.

Solo,
I did not realize they were doing that. Very interesting.

Andy

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Hi Andy,

Ford made news a couple of years ago, not because of IoT, but because of their big data initiatives. Their cars generate 25GB of data per hour, which prompted me to do a case study on theme a couple of years ago. Ford has continued to develop new strategies, which they revealed recently; http://www.govtech.com/fs/Ford-Innovation-Center-Tackles-Tra…

Many car companies now have telematics, like GMs OnStar, which capture a lot of data.

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25GB per hour seems extreme. At 1/2 hour per day, that is 4.5TB per year per vehicle. Where is that stored? Is it uploaded anywhere but a dealer? Even if transmitted, that turns into a ridiculous amount of data across an installed base … and of what use?

I would like to see the comparable number for Tesla, who seems to actually make use of what they collect.

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Ford uses the data in a number of ways. I’m going by memory from research I did a couple of years ago, here is what I remember, but this is likely only a partial list;

  • Monitor the health and reliability of their cars, maintenance cycles
  • Monitor for crashes, driver safety
  • Monitor usage of their vehicles, including driving patterns, routes, speeds, etc.
  • Driver specific characteristics such as driving style, driver settings / preferences
  • Monitor multiple on-board systems including (but not limited to) internal and external environmentals, accessory usage, brake and throttle pedal usage, i.e. pressure applied to the brake pedal/throttle pedal, suspension travel, frequency and forcefulness of stops, acceleration, etc.
  • Monitor battery recharge and discharge rates, range, frequency of charging - this includes the individual status and condition of each battery on-board.

They also share the data with the DOT to help with logistical planning for charging infrastructure. Also, some of these systems are volatile so the data is not kept indefinitely. Furthermore, while the on-board systems may be generating 25MB of data per hour, it does not necessarily mean Ford gathers all of that data, they may only collect specific data elements, and some of the data may be summarized by on-board systems before it is transmitted.

This is old news now, but there may still be some references to Ford’s big data efforts that you can dig up via Google. Here is one link with Ford’s Scott Lange equating cars to giant sensors on wheels:

http://www.dezeen.com/2014/03/12/internet-connected-cars-sxs…

*"The cars we drive nowadays are giant sensors on wheels, generating tons of data," said Scott Lange, executive creative director at Team Detroit, an agency that works closely with Ford. "Each car generates 25Mb of data per hour."*

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Invest wisely my friends
CMFSoloFool
Ticker Guide: NTGR and OTEX

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Note: There is confusion between 25MB and 25GB of data per hour. Ford is quoted in many places stating the plug-in electric vehicles generate 25GB (as in Gigabytes) per hour, but some Ford execs have stumbled at times and were quoted at 25MB per hour. The correct value is believed to be 25GB/hour for plug-in electrics.

Here is another more recent quote from a few months ago:
http://dataconomy.com/how-big-data-brought-ford-back-from-th…
Looking to the future, the velocity of Ford’s data is accelerating. The Fusion Energi plug-in hybrid, released last year, streams performance data from the car to Ford and generates 25GB of data per hour. Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure, describes the data collected from the vehicles as “small but growing”. He says “We gather data every time the customer plugs in. We know where they’re plugging in, how many gas miles they drove, how many electric miles, how often they plug in and how often they take trips. It’s helping to shape where we go next with products.” One proposed use of this data is to work out ‘peak times’ of energy usage, and charge customers a lower rate if they refrain from plugging in when power demand is high.

This next quote goes back to 2013, when I was doing my research:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/01/108-mpg-with-…
The new Ford Fusion Energi plug-in hybrid boasts 108 MPGe (miles per gallon of gas equivalent). Impressive. But what is equally impressive in this little car is the big data. 25 Gigabytes of data hourly, to be exact.

According to TorqueNews, Aaron Turpen reported that the car “has more than 145 actuators, 4,716 signals, and 74 sensors to monitor the perimeter around the car as well as the car’s functions and driver responses. These sensors produce more than 25 gigabytes of data hourly from more than 70 on-board computers that analyze it in real-time.”

And just one more quote, which refers to how Ford is handling the data:
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/digital-busines…
“Our Fusion electric vehicle generates 25 gigabytes of data per hour, so if we extracted it all in real time, we would soon run out of storage,” Butler said. “There’s clearly going to be some onboard processing as well as intelligent querying to make sure that we’re getting data that makes sense.”

This is a lot of data, but again as I stated earlier not all the data generated by all those sensors is necessarily collected by Ford. A lot of data gets summarized or aggregated and may never be exposed outside the vehicle in raw format.

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Invest wisely my friends
CMFSoloFool
Ticker Guide: NTGR and OTEX

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Note: There is confusion between 25MB and 25GB of data per hour.

Well, the whole thing is actually silly and specious.

Most cars use one or more CAN buses to interconnect the ECUs (Electronic Control Units). This is 1980’s technology whose protocol lacks a true acknowledgement response. So, what they decided to do was to simply rebroadcast most messages over and over and over and over and over… Even if the message hadn’t changed. The ECUs in your car are constantly telling each other what their own state is over and over and over and over…

Many messages come 10 times a second, some come even more frequently. So, if a receiver misses a message, the sender doesn’t care - it’s sending another one almost right away. This worked in cars because there weren’t many ECUs back then and the messages are small. That’s changing today, which is why there are multiple CAN buses and companies are looking at ethernet-based alternatives and Flexray.

Anyway, there are devices that you can buy to record traffic on one or more CAN buses. Engineers can look at the messages later to debug things. Chances are that Ford is talking about the raw CAN bus traffic data size in their numbers, but that’s silly, because it’s grade school level computer processing to remove the redundant messages and get a few orders of magnitude reduction in size with zero loss of data.

Honestly, that anyone would brag about this cracks me up.

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Anyway, there are devices that you can buy to record traffic on one or more CAN buses. Engineers can look at the messages later to debug things. Chances are that Ford is talking about the raw CAN bus traffic data size in their numbers, but that’s silly, because it’s grade school level computer processing to remove the redundant messages and get a few orders of magnitude reduction in size with zero loss of data.

That’s true for much of the data Smorgasbord, but not the entire picture, especially for plug-in electric vehicles. For liability reasons, Toyota and other marquees started implementing black-boxes when congress slammed Toyota for unintended accelerations. It evolved further with plug-in electric vehicles. Actually GM started capturing a lot of data with their OnStar systems, but they don’t talk much about it. Their vehicles equipped with OnStar are tracked everywhere they go. Now, with autonomous driving technologies, far more data is being generated and captured, much of it is for analytics. Many new vehicles are also starting to include vehicle to vehicle communication for collision avoidance and safety, which is further contributing to the data load.

There are still many gray areas around who owns the data, who can collect it, how and when, and how the data is used. That might take years to sort out, but cars are becoming very chatty and communicative. This is only going to increase.

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Invest wisely my friends
CMFSoloFool
Ticker Guide: NTGR and OTEX

28

That’s true for much of the data Smorgasbord, but not the entire picture, especially for plug-in electric vehicles.

Actually, it is the entire data compression picture, even for EVs.

All of the traffic you’ve talked about is typically on one or more CAN buses, and so has that data repetition pattern that is easily compressed by many orders of magnitude. It’s nothing about which to brag.

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All of the traffic you’ve talked about is typically on one or more CAN buses, and so has that data repetition pattern that is easily compressed by many orders of magnitude. It’s nothing about which to brag.

Nothing to brag, agreed. But the fact more and more data is being captured and becoming accessible to analyze is a generally a good thing.

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Invest wisely my friends
CMFSoloFool
Ticker Guide: NTGR and OTEX

30

Has anyone heard about a company called Nabto . Its a Danish company and they have patented a lightweight method to access all low cost low powered devices without a big capex.

This is supposed to help penetrate the non server/clud based platforms on IoT

Rajesh

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Has anyone heard about a company called Nabto

If you haven’t, start here

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q…

Denny Schlesinger

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I have read the technology and am tryomg to understand if they could potentially became a ioT standard for devices which are at homes or in critical care vs the server based iOT.