Last month, we welcomed MOTER Technologies, Inc. as the AECC’s newest member. We’re thrilled to have them on board and look forward to collaborating with them to help power the future of connected vehicle services. We recently sat down with Craig Lozofsky, chief operating officer at MOTER, to learn more about the company, his thoughts on the connected vehicle market, and why it was the right time to join the AECC. Here’s what he had to say.

AECC: Tell us about MOTER. What do you do and who do you serve?

CL: MOTER Technologies is a data science and software development company that works with automakers and insurers. We’re focused on learning how to better use the next generation of vehicle data to improve our understanding of risk and safety. With so many new sensors being put into vehicles to support a wide range of capabilities, we can gain a much better understanding of both driving behavior and the surrounding environment.

Historically, insurance companies have used tools like telematics to evaluate risk by measuring how frequently you speed, hit the brakes too hard, etc. Now, we’re able to get a far better idea of risk and safety by using more advanced tools – think radar, sonar, and computer vision – to better understand different circumstances. And, we can put that information into context with how you interact with other vehicles, other pedestrians on the roadway, and the rules of the road itself. This next generation of connected car data is incredibly valuable for insurance companies. There’s enormous potential for us to better understand safety as well as improve data monetization.

AECC: What inspires you right now about the connected car industry?

CL: The enormous amount of work being done around this next generation of safety systems can profoundly help us reduce accidents and injury to people and understand how to help people become safer drivers. The advent of all these systems requires more computing capability in the vehicle itself, which allows us to uncover all these added insights in an efficient way. For example, if we were going to send all this data off the vehicle to the cloud, it would probably cost more than the car itself. But the idea that we can efficiently analyze the data with excess compute on the vehicle is really exciting. There’s a long-standing issue of the balance between the cost of understanding things and the value of understanding things, and we at MOTER are excited about using all this new available data to help slash the costs of these activities while increasing the value of the output.

AECC: Why did you choose to join the AECC now and what do you think are the biggest membership benefits?

CL: We were really drawn in by the industry leaders in the group who are trying to push the envelope. Work that focuses on automotive edge computing makes everything we do possible. We literally couldn’t do our work without some aspect of edge computing, so the fact that there are groups out there focused on developing this is great for us. Additionally, there’s a huge opportunity for us to learn from and work with the people who are directly engaged in the actual building of vehicles, which is so important for our business. It’s the perfect forum for us, and we’re at the point where it’s the right time to be more engaged more broadly with the industry.

AECC: What do you look forward to most as a new AECC member?

CL: We look forward to collaborating with the other members and learning from them about where they’re trying to take automotive edge computing. This will help with our strategy and how we bring some of our visions and dreams to reality. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge brought to the table in this environment, and that’s really going to help us.

AECC: How do you see the connected vehicle services ecosystem evolving in the coming years?

CL: I see an enormous amount of potential to provide value for the consumer and manage their assets in a more cost-efficient way. We’re focused on how we make better insurance solutions for a lot of these people and how we can help them when something bad happens, such as a collision. We’re working on making that process simpler for all parties involved, which will make everyone’s life a little easier, take a lot of the cost out of the equation, and hopefully leave more money in consumers’ pockets.

AECC: Any final thoughts you’d like to add?

CL: We’re really excited about this moment in time in automotive development. There’s been a lot of focus and progress on how we use data, and I think that’s beneficial for everyone involved. It has the potential to help us improve our understanding of the customer and the way they operate to better serve them. In many ways, this is the first thing. Once you have the ability to leverage all this data, there is so much more you can do with it – whether it’s maintenance, extending life of vehicles, etc. And that’s very exciting.

The AECC invites you to learn more about becoming a member. With collaboration among OEMs, MNOs, cloud, app, and service providers, the AECC can help accelerate the development of high-value digital services across the ecosystem. Get in touch to learn how you can help invent the future of the connected car and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to date.