Creating a dynamic market requires upfront clarity and uniformity of interfaces between different components and type of actors, necessary to improve confidence for investments, and to ensure seamless end-to-end service for the customer.
An example of convergence on a standard: USB interface to charge smartphones has considerebly improved the life of consumers, and probably also the environmental burden for our dear planet. Who hasn’t got a box of obsolete chargers at the office or at home?
At the opposite, just as symbolic: rather than a common standard for charging electric vehicles in Europe, we have 3 competing systems (Chademo, Combo and AC) making the life of infrastructure and service providers, manufacturers and users much worse than it should be.
It is all the more ridiculous, because everybody was more or less starting from scratch, and there was no good reason to fail collectively, apart from parochial attitudes, driven by national or industry so-called interests.
And guess who is surfing the wave of electric vehicles now? Certainly not Europe.
They should if they want to keep the same level of leadership on the market than in the past decades at the car manufacturer and equipment supplier level.
No actor will manage to keep its position on its own, competitors, suppliers and customers need to cooperate to build the market collectively, while organising their own position in the competitive lanscape, of course.
“Cooperate with your competitors and win!”.
This requires some maturity and midterm vision, and also the appropriate discussion and coworking fora, which is in the primary focus of Comonvent, “partnership strategies for innovation”.
The july announcement of an open platform to be developped by BMW, Mobileye and Intel could be a significant step in the right direction, allthough what “open platform” means to the other actors needs to be clarified.
Please give us your thoughts on the way we should proceed collectively to build our future efficient automotive marketplace.
gkinkelin@comonvent.com