17 November 2013

Jaguar Land Rover has refused to rule out charging its franchised retailers for information gathered from in-car ‘black-box’ systems.

Speaking at the Institute for Car Fleet Management conference last week, Mike Bell, JLR’s global connected car director, said the technology to gather information about the car’s systems, location and speed was being built in to all future Jaguar and Land Rover product starting with the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and 2014 model-year Evoque.

While the technology will be built in to all JLR products, it will be up to the car’s owner to have the data streaming turned on.

Bell said: “We need to recoup the cost and we’re looking at what to do with the data. We’re looking at the business models for how we would monetise the information.

“There is a bill to JLR for doing this and a cost for maintaining it and we won’t cover all of the cost.”

When quizzed by Auto Retail Agenda if the customer, retailer or manufacturer owned the data, Bell stated: “The data belongs to JLR. When the customer signs up to the connected services they sign a contract giving us the data.”

Bell would not commit to allowing franchised Jaguar and Land Rover retailers free access to the data on cars they sold, saying only: “The data is very valuable from an aftersales perspective.”

He added: “We are looking at aftersales options, we’d be mad not to. We have to look at what the customer wants. We’ve not decided what we’ll do yet, but we think we will have to incentivise the customer to say yes to data by selling them the benefits of saying yes.”

Many industry experts believe that data from connected cars offers an opportunity for retailers in both aftersales and sales because it would allow dealerships to pro-actively identify service and maintenance work as well as mileage so that they can contact customers knowing that a service is due, or that they will be thinking of a new car.

Tags: black boxes, charging for data, connected cars, Jaguar Land Rover, technology