How Much Data will be Flowing Between Connected Cars?

Gartner recently predicted that there will be more than 250 million “connected vehicles” on the road by 2020.

Yes, this includes internet connectivity to the vehicle for entertainment or to create a rolling mobile hotspot, but what will be really transformative is the car-specific data that will be moving between the vehicles and their stakeholders in real time:

• The driver can have a suite of apps that remotely control aspects of the car, or alert the owner (and police) to any kind of security breach, complete with HD pictures and video.
• Manufacturers will be able to remotely diagnose and schedule maintenance or recalls on vehicles using engine and body sensors that automatically report their conditions to the manufacturer, or other possible 3rd parties.
• Opt-in, real-time ads using location-based services will surely be coming to a dashboard near you, offering deals as you drive past the providers in real time.
• And eventually, cars will talk directly to other cars to automate accident avoidance, or possibly just to improve the flow of traffic at rush hour. Heck, when we all have self-driving cars, we’ll just speak our destination and the car will figure out the rest while we play Candy Crush or catch up on email.

The operational scale of these connected car networks will be staggering. If those 250 million vehicles are generating or consuming thousands of updates daily, that will be hundreds of trillions of messages a year that need to be routed to and from vehicles and to a broad range of additional endpoints.

Solace is currently working with a number of players in the connected car ecosystem to help build a scalable foundation for this type of information flow between the various stakeholders listed above. It will be exciting to see it unfold over the coming years.