The Wave Of Attribution Is Coming To Car Culture
The advent of software has brought about an explosion of applicable knowledge across industries, upending every gut-driven business model in its path. Healthcare, finance, advertising, retail, entertainment… each of them now feeds on a steady diet of data in order to attribute their decisions: to find cause and effect in everything they do.
No sector has completely escaped the digital wrath of attribution, but automobiles have proven to be among the most elusive. Drivers still pay a pittance for land use. Employers still have zero accountability for the financial and environmental burden car ownership places on a region. Collisions still present such a mystery that 30% of them only exist on the honor system.
For all their claims of innovation, carmakers have kept vehicles and owners isolated from any semblance of attribution. Connected cars will shatter that blissful ignorance, and as V2X is crucial to the advancement of self-driving tech and shared access, connectivity may prove to be the last great automotive feature.
Take March’s fatal Uber crash. Tragic as roadway fatalities are, they make for extremely poor attribution models: a car of a different shape, or a pedestrian with a different reaction time, or even a city with different emergency response operations could have meant the difference between a…
