“The car of tomorrow will essentially be a data center on wheels.”
So says the narrator of a video that introduced a keynote speech by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show.
Auto industry observers already know that modern cars are chock-full of data, and most know that that trend will continue as cars gain more and more autonomous driving and driver-assist technology. The question then is how can the car wash industry take advantage of all that data to make sure it remains relevant?
According to Krzanich, the average person generates about 650 megabytes of data per day while using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and email. That number is estimated to grow to 1.5 gigabytes by 2020 — more than double the current volume in just four years.
Krzanich said an autonomous car will have an output of 4,000 gigabytes a day of data. That’s more than the 3,000 gigabytes per day of an average “smart” hospital.
“Let’s assume that by 2025, there’s a million autonomous cars out there driving on the roads,” Krzanich said. “Remember there’s many times that number of cars sold each year. I’m talking about a small percentage of cars, and that’s going to be equivalent to 3 billion people’s data every day.”
According to Krzanich, the data falls into three categories; technical data (data concerning how a car interacts with the road and environment around it), societal and crowd-sourced data (think Google’s Waze navigation app), and personal data. All three can be harnessed by car wash professionals to create opportunities, but personal data is perhaps the most important to any business in the automotive industry.
“Whoever has the best and most of this type of data will be able to have the best applications, will be the best resourced to be able to provide that type of user interface and convenience,” Krzanich said.
The ability for your machine to learn your preferences and cater to them is becoming more and more important.
Perhaps your vehicle knows you like to visit a car wash twice per month, an average of 17 days between visits. What if you, as a car wash owner, could tap into that data and direct market to those customers when they’re around the window when they would normally be prone to wash their vehicle? Better yet, what if you could reach them in their vehicles?
We’re not far off from being able to program your self-driving car to visit the nearest car wash based upon different data points. For example, vehicles could use algorithms based on crowd-sourced reviews, pricing availability and traffic patterns to point them in the direction of the best-ranked, least expensive and shortest wait time wash in the area.
The increase in data won’t just affect how often self-driving cars come in for a wash or how they choose where to go, but it will affect the way car wash owners interact with customers.
You can already email reminders or coupons to consumers who give you their email address — but what if you could talk to the car directly? What if your car wash could send reminders to the self-driving car and remind it that it hasn’t been in for a wash in a while?
There’s other ways to use data, of course. Right now, what do you know about your customer? You probably know the name, gender, approximate age and car wash preferences of some of your regulars. You might even know some of their other household vehicles and some of the other people in their house. But what if you could use other preferences to tailor their experience at the store?
What if your business pinged an app on their phone with a tailor-made playlist of music for them to enjoy while they wait? This could apply to TV shows or movies too. If you know their coffee preferences, and you serve free coffee, you could have a cup waiting for them. If you know that 75 percent of the folks in your waiting room at a given time are sports fans, you could have your cashier switch the TV from news to ESPN.
How do you get this data? There are myriad ways. Allowing consumers to opt in via an app or website/email signup could do it. Creating smartphone and tablet apps is another way. Consumers could even opt-in to some of these things onsite, through a kiosk that records their info and preferences.
Another way: It could come via the car. For example, if the self-driving car knows that John Smith likes sports and coffee with two creamers, and he always pays for the deluxe car wash package, and if the car knows it’s on the way to the car wash, it can broadcast to the car wash that it’s on its way. An alert could go out to the cashier with an estimated time of arrival, and he or she could have the system ready to accommodate his wash package when he arrives. When he exits the car and heads to the waiting room, a notification on his phone could tell him that if he wants to open your app, the ballgame will be the first entertainment option to choose from. Finally, when he gets to the coffee bar, he might find a hot cup of coffee with two creams waiting.
What about security though? Hacking is a real risk.
“The car is especially a place we want to make sure is secure,” Krzanich said. “We believe that to do this, it’s going to take the industry coming together and collaborating. No one company will able to provide all the security solutions.” He said Intel is investing $250 million over the next few years to encourage collaboration within the industry.
If the automotive industry can crack how to keep data secure, and keep consumers comfortable with sharing their data, car wash owners and operators (and retailers in general) will likely have an opportunity to use that data to increase business and improve the customer experience.