January, 2015
The media confirmed this week that the Justice Department is in fact tracking the movements of millions of vehicles across the US and storing the data in a database that gets purged every 90 days. The type of data collected includes license plate information, location the vehicle is coming from and direction the vehicle is headed to, as well as photos of drivers and passengers.
While the vehicle tracking program is compliant with federal law, the data is only available to federal, state, and local law enforcement organizations and is to be used specifically for combating drug trafficking. Car companies do not currently have access to this kind of data, but the tracking program opens up the possibilities of how companies could use similar data.
With more and more data available around vehicle movement and consumer choices (such as vehicle preferences and transportation patterns), there is the opportunity to focus consumer marketing campaigns. As identified in the Jabian Vehicle Value Chain, this type of data could drive targeted marketing and be a huge differentiator for manufacturers and dealers.
The power of this kind of data is exponential – think about how much more we would know about which vehicles people are driving, which vehicles are popular by location and region, and of course, travel data about commuters. Collecting this kind of data could be very insightful for car companies, as well as retailers, around what people are driving and real-time market changes. Thinking about the value chain and the vehicle lifetime, this type of data would provide valuable intel associated with pricing a used vehicle.
To ponder: can companies balance access to this data with the right amount of privacy?