Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar (Part 4)

Luke Schneider: Transportation, as a whole, is segregating into three big buckets. There’s owned transportation, which is the traditional or conventional way. It’s what my parents did and sort of what I do where you own a car, drive a car, sell the car, and buy another one. If you own an Aston Martin, it’s a bigger trophy than if you own a Toyota. That’s not going to go away. Automakers are going to manufacture cars despite urbanization. The long-term prognosis for that though is that they won’t sell as many.

The second big bucket is delivery. We’ve seen this with Uber and Lyft. We’ve also seen how companies have come in and essentially attacked and disrupted an industry where, much like the car airport rental industry, customers have been slowly dumbed down into this bad experience. There was a time when taxis in New York stunk and drivers didn’t know where they were going. That all changed. Competition changes that for the better. You have this conflict between the old business model where you buy a medallion versus you drop a pin on an app and you get picked up by somebody you never even heard of. It’s changed things for the better. Medallions only exist to limit supply and raise prices.

The third bucket is where we live in and that’s shared transportation. Like I said, there’s probably a thousand use cases for shared transportation. One is airport car rental. There are lots of different reasons people need it. If you think about transportation as a bit of cloud where there are lots of different assets out there, what our technology does is allow us to deliver any one of those assets to anybody in a way they want. If you have the money and you live in San Francisco, and you want to play pebble beach for the day and you want to bring three of your friends, you should be able to have a Q7 delivered to your door. If you have five friends and you all work as consultants and you all travel all week, but when you’re home, you want a nice car, share a car. If you just want a car for six months out of the year in a particular location, you should be able to order it and have it delivered. If you want it to be a new car and you can pay for it, great. If you’re okay with a car that has 20,000 miles in it, fine too. The point is, going forward, all of these car manufacturers are probably going to look for ways to replace what is probably going to be declining sales revenue with rising service revenue. What we view ourselves as is the technology and the operations delivery platform to deliver that where people want it.

Sramana Mitra: All those trends are very much on our radar. The thing that is going to really bring Internet of Things into this conversation in a major way is self-driving cars, right? The point at which there are self-driving cars that are completely operated by an app or some sort of a console, that’s where Internet of Things really kicks in gear.

Luke Schneider: That’s one aspect of it, for sure. You have to segregate this world of personal transportation into getting access to the asset. The other piece is the drive itself. How does the vehicle asset interact with the world around it. This is a job I almost took with Audi about running their connected car strategy. You can think of connected cars in a lot of different ways. One used to be, “Tell me where I can go get barbecue.” The other one is, “Tell me where the next battery charging station is.” Then this last piece, which has gotten the fascination of many is autonomous driving vehicles. I can be honest with you. People are a little pie in the sky and get starry-eyed when they think about this and what it’s going to mean.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar
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