WHY IT RATES: Avis continues to work on optimizing its connected car data.—Donald Wood, Breaking News Senior Writer.
Avis Budget Group announced a partnership with Otonomo, the leading automotive data services platform, to unlock new avenues for value creation from the data generated by its connected fleet. The fleet will cover an estimated 4 billion road miles this year and is anticipated to generate over seven billion road miles of data with its fully connected fleet in 2020.
The Otonomo Automotive Data Services Platform will help Avis Budget Group gain new and actionable insights from its connected cars, which span a diverse range of makes, models and telematics technologies. By reshaping this disparate connected car data for new users, Avis Budget Group will gain insights to streamline operations, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. The Otonomo Platform also provides Avis Budget Group with new opportunities for collaboration with cities and other partners that benefit its customers and the general public.
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“By partnering with Otonomo, we can better utilize the data captured by our connected vehicles,” said Arthur Orduna, Chief Innovation Officer at Avis Budget Group. “The Otonomo Platform also allows us to safely and securely engage with new public and commercial partners, and together, make an impact on what the future of mobility looks like for consumers, communities and companies alike.”
J.D. Power is among the first companies to use Avis Budget Group data. One key application is using data captured directly from vehicles to complement its consumer research on different makes and models. “Working with Otonomo and Avis Budget Group will add another dimension of rich data to J.D. Power’s Voice of the Vehicle analyses,” said Dave Sargent, Vice President, Global Automotive at J.D. Power. “The fleet is large, yielding high quality data with excellent national coverage—and it is also very diverse, with over 200 makes and models, spanning multiple years in the data set we’ve evaluated. We’re particularly interested in the signals we get from a fleet that is constantly refreshed with a wide selection of new vehicles.”
With the help of Otonomo, Avis Budget Group can explore additional “data for good” opportunities that can make smart cities smarter, roads safer, traffic flow and parking more efficient, and driving more enjoyable. Data from the Avis Budget Group fleet could significantly improve smart city applications such as planning, road hazard identification or advanced traffic management. In time, this could translate to reduced emissions, accident prediction and prevention and an overall better experience for all travelers.
“Otonomo is a pioneer in transforming car data into valuable insights, and we’re excited at the opportunity to realize our vision in partnership with Avis Budget Group,” said Ben Volkow, Chief Executive Office and Founder of Otonomo. “The global scale of Avis Budget Group, along with its fleet management expertise, offers many new possibilities to realize value from connected car data from fleet-wide predictive maintenance and streamline rental car returns, to smart city and beyond.”
“Data aggregation and analysis is a force multiplier for the automotive industry,” said Roger Lanctot, Director, Automotive Connected Mobility at Strategy Analytics. “Data enables fleet operators to optimize their service offerings, refine their logistics, increase uptime, and improve the user experience. This is nothing less than a breakthrough in an otherwise mature industry.”
