Although many owners realize regular maintenance will result in more efficient driving and a likely higher resale, many simply feel in the dark about the their vehicle’s health. “I mean, have you taken a look under the hood of your vehicle lately? It’s like another planet under there!” are the types of comments I have heard during user research for an owner’s site.

We’re getting connected with our behaviors
But that’s changing. The web has been connecting us with other people for a while, but it’s now only really just starting to connect us with our behaviors. Consumers are finding a lot more about themselves by their behaviors. Business writers and consultants typically call this “transparency.”

It’s a talking shoe!
Take, for example, Nike+, a partnership between Nike and Apple that allows consumers to collect, analyze and exploit information about their running behavior. Nike+ has been a phenomenal success because it has acted as a telematics device for a shoe. Your shoe will now tell you, in the form of a digital voice through your iPod, how many miles you ran, how many calories you burnt, how fast you ran and even, which songs to listen to.

Depending on the type of workout you choose from the Nike + iPod menu, a counter displays your time, distance or calories burned along with the title of the current song being played

Not just tracking UPS trucks, tracking spimes
In the digital industry this is called tracking spimes. Spimes are defined as theoretical objects that can be tracked over space and time. Spimes have been around for a while in many industries: People, shoes, packages, taxis, music taste, phones, trams, buses, planes and ships are all being tracked.

When a product is converted into a spime, it allows consumers to optimize how they use it. So it’s no wonder that many auto companies have been looking at how to bring all the benefits of spimes and telematics to vehicle owners.

Help me drive my car more efficiently
Consumers want to see how much fuel they’ve been using on their daily commute. They want to measure the impact of their new driving habits. They want to change the way they drive their car. Having a clear view of these habits can change the way consumers drive. The challenge is collecting this data. Then aggregating it.

One of the enhancements coming this fall for Microsoft’s in-car Sync technology is a “Vehicle Health Report,” which will help owners to monitor the vehicle’s usage. The first release of the Vehicle Health Report will focus on the basics such as vehicle diagnostics, maintenance scheduling and recalls.

At the Chicago Auto Show in February Ford introduced Crew Chief, a fleet telematics and diagnostics system, which will be available on the 2009 F-Series pickups and E-Series vans. Aimed at smaller business owners to monitor their fleets, Crew Chief gives small fleet owners access to telematic tools which were previously only in the domain for large fleet operators like UPS.

Crew Chief is aimed at small fleet owners looking to efficiently manage their vehicles, quickly dispatch workers to job sites and keep detailed vehicle maintenance records.

It’s a Talking Car!
Now with gas prices surging, there seems to be a renewed urgency on keeping up vehicle efficiency. It’s pretty easy to see that the trend for optimizing vehicle usage via spime tracking will proliferate to the masses. When this happens, it will bring the added benefit of the network effect.

We are already seeing mass aggregation of anonymous vehicle spime data – take for example traffic mapping. Cellint’s TrafficSense measures traffic data by analyzing the movement of anonymous cellular phones in vehicles.

But do vehicle owners really want to compare themselves with one another? That user research I referenced earlier shows that by-and-large, owners are indifferent to viewing how they sit in the crowd. They find more value in everyday pragmatic uses of the data. For example, consumers want to see how much their daily commute is costing them, not how much CO2 emission their neighborhood has emitted.

Cut to the chase
The same way the ubiquitous service reminder sticker became the authority for vehicle maintenance, everyday vehicle telematics will become the authoritive reference point for owners in the future. After we turn vehicles into “spimes” the key will be to design something as clear and pragmatic as the sticker.

Related links

• Nike+
• These shoes are made for talking; New York Times, 11.01.2006
• What is a spime?; OpenSpime, 02.21.2008
• Sync
• Ford Work Solutions: Affordable technologies for Ford trucks; Ford Motor Company Global Auto Shows, 02.06.2008
• TrafficSense

Related disclosures

• Avenue A | Razorfish (AA|RF) is an operating unit of aQuantive, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft
• AA|RF created and maintains the Sync as well as the Ford Motor Company Global Auto Shows sites

Image credits
Nike+iPod photograph appears courtesy of Apple.com; Crew Chief photograph appears courtesy of the Ford Motor Company Global Auto Show site