By Jeremy Green, Machina Research
Most of the interest around connected cars focuses on the embedded vehicle platform. In a way, that’s obvious and correct. Machina Research estimates that by 2024 there will be almost 624 million vehicles on the roads with some form of embedded factory-fit connection. This market will be worth USD 39,681 million – and that’s not counting all the specific applications, like navigation services or roadside assistance, provided separately but enabled by the vehicle platform.
But there will be lots of older vehicles still driving around without an embedded platform. How are they going to be drawn into the world of connected car services?
One answer might be an add-on device that bridges the gap between an embedded platform and a smartphone-only application. The DropTag, a little plastic disc that sticks to a car’s windscreen with a self-adhesive pad has the potential to transform business models across a wide range of industry sectors.
The DropTag is a flat piece of plastic maybe four centimetres across. It has been designed by Cambridge Consultants, a firm of high-tech product developers based in…well, it wasn’t hard to guess, was it? So far there are two use cases, in pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) car insurance and refrigerated transport, though it’s not hard to imagine others.
The tag is designed to be used in conjunction with a smartphone application, and of course with a back-end server that does lots of big data analytics. It’s an alternative to conventional insurance telematics black boxes, which cost around £300 to supply and install. That makes the boxes uneconomic for all but the most hard-to-insure drivers. This high cost base is one of the reasons why usage based insurance has remained a niche product.
The DropTag is described as ‘an order of magnitude cheaper’ than a telematics box, though unofficially I’ve heard prices even lower than the £30 that implies. It’s fixed to the windscreen via an adhesive tag, so there are no installation costs, and the screen acts as an amplifier for the vibrations.
The version of the tag used in the car insurance case contains sensors capable of measuring longitudinal and lateral acceleration, a Bluetooth chip, a coin-cell battery, and hardware and firmware to support some local data storage and processing. Every other kind of functionality has been stripped out to keep the manufacturing simple and the price low.
What is it possible to learn from the data collected by the tag, which after all doesn’t have a GPS or any connections to the car’s electronics? Quite a lot.
The tag logs events as they happen, stores them, and shares them with a paired smartphone next time it comes within range. Clever algorithms (trademarked by Cambridge Consultants as ‘Journey Fingerprints’) analyse the vibrations measured by the accelerometers in the tag so as to determine engine speed, heavy braking and acceleration, and sudden steering manoeuvres. Wheel vibration and engine vibration data can be distinguished and combined so as to derive vehicle speed, and this can be further enhanced with other data – from an application on the paired smartphone so as to include GPS readings, for example, or with weather information about the relevant date, time and place. The GPS readings can provide an alternative measurement of speed, and these can then be used to cross-calibrate the two different sources against each other.
The sensors can pick up the physical explosions of each cylinder in the engine, which can confirm that the tag is fixed to the same kind of vehicle as is insured on the policy. The application can detect gear changes, and this provides further information about how the car is being driven.
It can measure the extreme vibrations associated with a crash, and use these to determine duration, direction and severity. It could be used to deliver similar functionality to the eCall devices, so that the driver’s smartphone would automatically make an emergency call under certain conditions. Similarly, it can notify the insurer, for whom making early contact with the driver in the case of even a minor accident, and processing the paperwork around a claim, has enormous financial implications. The tag can also detect more minor bumps, and even door openings and closes, which can be used as a trigger to analyse whether the vehicle’s driver has changed.
Cambridge Consultants are already working with an un-named British insurer to bring this product to market, and the devices are already in volume production. I suspect that this won’t be the last we see of the DropTag either. As a cheap “smart peripheral” it looks to be the forerunner of a new family of Internet of Things devices to be used in conjunction with smartphones and cloud applications.
Connected Cars Blog 
Written by harrychapman123
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