Mobility market moving towards open platforms

Original equipment manufacturers, ride-hailing companies, transit agencies, and governments will each impact on – and be
profoundly impacted by – the mobility revolution.

Now pegged at $150-200 billion, the mobility market is slated to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030 as innovation proceeds apace.
With market incumbents and disruptors working to hasten the new innovations and offerings that will fuel mobility’s growth, the
shape that growth will take – and the degree to which end users will benefit – hinges on whether the market will be dominated by closed or open source platforms.

Companies looking to break into the mobility market confront two major challenges: Major players like Uber have invested massively in user acquisition, driving down prices and making it harder for smaller companies to reach consumers. Compounding these difficulties are technological challenges. Dominant players have made significant investments in R&D to create huge efficiency gaps between more entrenched incumbents and smaller upstarts.

Dominant players’ more advanced technology helps them optimize routes, distribute rides, and manage drivers’ time more ffectively.

The Ubers and the Lyfts may continue to enjoy an outsized share of the market for the foreseeable future. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily inherently bad for consumers. It’s one thing for major players to dominate the market because there simply aren’t alternative mobility service providers.

It’s quite another if users don’t have access to a wider array of transport providers due to the dominance of a few.
One of the barriers is awareness: It is not enough for multiple smart mobility alternatives to simply exist. If end users lack knowledge of those alternatives, the market will merely function as a closed source.

Providing mobility choice

Technologically, just as Google revolutionized the Internet by providing users with a neutral platform aggregating different content providers in one place, mobility users will benefit most from platforms that aggregate the full spectrum of mobility services, allowing them to make their transport choices in an open source system.

Encouragingly, market forces are moving in this direction. For instance, Ford’s Transportation Mobility Cloud, announced at CES 2018, aims to connect users to a range of mobility choices, including public and private car and transit services and bike-sharing. Called the “Transportation Mobility Cloud” the platform is designed to help connect smart transportation services, as well as adjacent connected offerings, uniting them with one common language to help coordinate all these efforts in real-time.
That means tying together personal cars with vehicle-to-everything.

Smart cities 

HERE Mobility provides the missing piece for building the future of smart cities’ transportation.
Cities are served by dozens of transportation modes and providers, each holding only their small piece of urban mobility serving their needs and interests. In order to achieve efficient urban mobility, there are three key components that cities need, a versatile mobility market, visibility into urban mobility, and smart city optimization tools.

• Offer a versatile mobility market to businesses and people in cities.
• Get visibility into cities urban mobility ecosystem across all transportation types.
• Optimize cities with real-time data and mobility trends and manage problems as they develop.