Bringing Distributed Ledgers to Automotive: The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative

The recently launched Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) consortium is a nonprofit organization set up to enhance digital mobility services in terms of efficiency, affordability, sustainability, and safety through the adoption of blockchain and distributed ledgers technologies across the entire mobility services value chain. The wider aim is to use blockchain to reinvent mobility and enable industry transformation through open and inclusive ecosystem dynamics and interoperable open-source technology approaches. Blockchain technologies are considered critical in terms of their built-in trust and transparency; they eliminate fraud and improve monetization opportunities while reducing ecosystem friction and transaction costs. At the same time, blockchain will redefine the vehicle ownership and user experience. MOBI aims at defining future standards for blockchain in automotive.

Targeted use cases include digital vehicle identity, location, and history; supply chain tracking, transparency, and efficiency; congestion fees; autonomous machine payments; mobility commerce platforms; carbon pricing; driving data security; car and ride sharing; usage-based insurance; usage-based taxes; and pollution taxes.

Founding members include car Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), suppliers, startups, and government agencies. Partners include Ford, GM, BMW, Bosch, Renault, ZF, Shift, Dashride, Ride Austin, and insurer Aioi. Sponsors include Accenture, Luxoft, IBM, ConsenSys, Hyperledger, the Trusted IoT Alliance, and a large number of startups.

While blockchain has the potential to offer short-term, quick wins like certified mileage of used cars and other vehicle ownership data, its larger relevance lies in future, more transformative use cases like micropayments for continuous wireless charging of electric vehicles, secure Over-the-Air (OTA) downloads, cooperative mobility and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), various forms of road user charging, shared vehicle ownership and access, and driverless car sharing. More generally, blockchain will be able to add much needed trust, identity, and  traceability to a meshed mobility environment dominated by massive transactions and continuous interactions, not just within automotive but also in its interactions with adjacent markets like smart home (Vehicle-to-Home [V2H]), energy (Vehicle-to-Grid [V2G]), and retail (in-car and in-home delivery).  

The traditional economy, centered on employment in the manufacturing and services industries by large enterprises, is starting to give way to new models aimed at increasing efficiencies, increasing utilization rates of assets, and creating more scalable approaches heavily linked to “as a service” shared, crowdsourced, and distributed models supporting new forms of (self-) employment and microbusinesses. This new smart economy is made possible by a range of technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, e-commerce, and blockchain for micropayments and eGovernment, which collectively are in the process of not just reorganizing and restructuring the economy but also transforming, redefining, and reinventing it. New financial instruments like distributed ledgers will be critical for organizing trusted interactions between an increasing number of actors in the new economies, especially when it relates to decentralized, disintermediated peer-to-peer transactions, meshed environments, and frictionless cross-vertical collaboration and commerce, which will require massive amounts of automated micropayments subject to dynamic pricing, often between physical systems to which identities will be assigned. Blockchain will change the very nature of enterprises, ecosystems, trade, money and financial services, and the economy as a whole with real-time and reliable information exchange driving global market transparency. 

While the above is valid for the economy as a whole, it is particularly relevant for the new smart mobility environment dominated by driverless vehicle sharing and cooperative mobility paradigms, not just in the consumer sector but also in freight with the deployment of smart contracts and e-freight brokerage for e-trade, virtual currencies, and crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending.  In this respect, the importance of blockchain far exceeds the individual use cases listed above but should be seen as an overall enabler of automotive industry transformation.

However, blockchain initiatives suffer from being overhyped and marketing-driven, with many (technical) aspects and challenges being overlooked or ignored. What is needed is a combination of deep knowledge and understanding of how the automotive industry will evolve and how blockchain technologies can enable this transformation. Multidisciplinary cooperation will be key to achieve these synergies. If anything, initiatives like MOBI will allow accomplishing exactly this: increase the mutual understanding of blockchain-enabled automotive industry disruption.