How Automakers Use Data

[upbeat music] All right, we are speaking here with John Heinlein.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

Um, you're from Sonatus, and Sonatus just did an interesting survey with, uh, in-car data.

What can you tell me about it?

Yeah.

So every year, uh...

It's nice to join you.

Thanks for having me.

Uh, every year we've collaborated with Omdia for the past two years to do a survey about the evolution of the SDV market, uh, understanding that SDV is a rapidly evolving space, and everyone's interested in it.

And, uh, we asked, uh, over almost 600 participants around the world from six countries, uh, pr- primarily automakers, but also tier one suppliers, tier two suppliers, uh, about, uh, a number of different aspects, and, and data was one key aspect we focused on.

And I know that there's a lot of things that are in the survey, and I would direct, uh, listeners to, to those, uh, to the survey itself to get the detail, but we wanna talk a little bit about, um, some of the, the trends that you've discovered have changed yours- on, on in-car data.

Um, the headline trend being that data, data monetization, which definitely was a big idea with that in-car data w- when we first were talking about it, or at least earlier in, in the, the, the history of this, this technology.

Um, it's not as, as big of a priority according to the executives that you spoke with.

Yeah, I would think about it this way.

As we go towards software-defined vehicles, we, we know that there's going to be incredible amounts of data being produced across the many different subsystems from a vehicle.

Uh, it can be terabytes a day.

And the, it-- Our survey last year, 2025's, uh, survey, we found that the number one application of vehicle data, 51% of respondents, it was the top choice among many choices, was vehicle data monetization.

And I think, uh, we feel, we interpreted that to mean that taking that huge amount of data and finding ways to directly monetize it, sell it, package it, bundle it for, for various different things.

I think a lot of things have changed.

I think there have been a number of different concerns about privacy and so on over the past, uh, y- year or two.

Uh, and I think also, more generally, I think there's a realization that while the data is there, there are probably m- more valuable ways to use the data.

So while vehicle data monetization today, uh, in our survey this year, 2026, was still the top choice at 44% versus 51% last year, it was far lower, and what you saw was now 41% of respondents said use that data for ongoing improvement of ADAS and autonomous driving.

38% said use data-driven product development and improvement, and 34%, you know, use for enhanced cybersecurity and fraud detection.

So w- we feel as if the trend is shifting towards instead of directly selling data, it's rather building data-driven platforms that add value and add capabilities that customers will pay for and be happy you have.

And so, of course, the obvious question when we hear that there's been a...