In connected car news are Cambridge Mobile Telematics, Payment24, Motorq and Garrett Motion.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics Buys TrueMotion
Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), the global leader in mobile telematics and analytics, has acquired TrueMotion, the second largest mobile telematics provider. This acquisition, which closed yesterday, unites the two leading companies in the rapidly growing mobile telematics industry. CMT will now provide telematics services to 21 out of the 25 largest auto insurers in the United States, and across more than 20 countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa, Japan, and Australia.
Mobile telematics, which did not exist a decade ago, is estimated to become a $125 billion market in the next five years, powering the next generation of digital auto insurance. CMT’s platform combines sensor fusion, artificial intelligence, and behavioral science to enable insurers, rideshare companies, fleet operators, automakers, and the personal safety industry to accurately measure driving risk, help drivers become safer, and offer real-time crash assistance.
Payment24 Biometrics for Vehicles
Fuel management and payment solutions specialists Payment24 have launched “biometrics for the vehicle” which instantly identifies any vehicle enrolled in the system as it drives into the forecourt, and then authorises refuelling and automates payment.
According to Payment24, the new module in their solutions suite is designed to allow petrol companies and organisations operating their own fuelling home bases to improve service and efficiency and reduce the risk of fraud.
Motorq, the connected car API company, has closed a $7 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Story Ventures with participation from existing investors FM Capital and Monta Vista Capital and a new strategic investor Avanta Ventures, the investment arm of CSAA, a AAA Insurer. The company also unveiled a suite of fleet management intelligence tools designed to help fleet owners and managers reduce cost, increase efficiency and improve overall fleet management.
Motorq’s cloud-based system ingests and monitors embedded data from a vehicle’s onboard computers, runs advanced analytics and machine learning models, contextualizes the insights with other information sets and delivers those insights to customers via application programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools. Datapoints include vehicle location, charge/fuel use, driver behavior, safety warnings, maintenance alerts, certain remote commands, and other important information.
The company’s new suite of tools include Pre-Delivery Tracking, Full Vehicle Portal, V3 API Access, Snowflake Data Lake Integration, and many others.
Motorq is initially focused on deploying the platform into the business fleet and dealer markets, where business owners can use the data to increase safety, efficiency and become more profitable. Fleet owners can easily customize analytics and reporting options and also integrate the insights into their own applications and workflows.
Long term, Motorq envisions a world where consumers also benefit from a connected vehicle ecosystem of features, data, information and applications.
Key to Motorq’s goal of creating this global connected vehicle platform is its success in securing developer agreements with auto manufacturers. Today, Motorq is the leading integration platform for global OEM’s. With relationships with seven of the top 10 global leaders covering 21 brands, Motorq is able to quickly and securely connect to and provision information from more than 32 million vehicles, a number that is increasing each day. Having direct access to vehicle data streams across disparate manufacturers is not just a prerequisite for a scalable platform, it’s also extremely difficult and time consuming.
Garrett Motions New Software
Garrett Motion Inc., a leading differentiated technology provider for the automotive industry, announced it has launched a new software solution focused on Model-Based Predictive Control (MPC) technology with Hyundai Motor Company (HMC).
Garrett’s advanced MPC technology is able to predict and preemptively optimize how a system operates in real-world conditions, enabling all types of light and commercial vehicles, whether ICE, hybrid, battery electric, or hydrogen fuel cell powered, to improve performance, efficiency and reliability. Despite its potential, MPC has been rarely used in the automotive industry primarily due to the complexity of its implementation and computational requirements. However, Garrett created a solution to overcome these challenges by providing a complete toolchain to make the implementation and deployment of the technology much faster and straightforward, allowing efficient implementation on current and future vehicle platforms. The rollout of Garrett’s embedded MPC for use in HMC’s passenger vehicles is another fundamental step in bringing this technology to the global automotive industry for all types of vehicles.
The launch by Garrett encompasses Hyundai’s all-new i20 N and is expected to include other vehicle models equipped with HMC’s new 1.6-liter turbocharged engine. Garrett’s next-generation software enables OEMs to optimize vehicle performance and deliver superior fuel economy and emissions by predictively optimizing boost control and health management control. It has been integrated within the existing electronic control unit (ECU) and comes with a calibration tool that empowers OEMs to configure and calibrate Garrett’s software to realize breakthrough results in performance as well as reduced development efforts and costs.