are just as much pieces of technology as they are vehicles, and the automaker’s ecosystem has begun to help consumers see the value of data in modern mobility. Recently, EVANNEX got the chance to speak with Andy Chatham, founder of the open-source connected car app DIMO, about what role data can play in the modern automotive landscape.
The lifecycle for a user at DIMO is you connect your car, we start building a digital twin of that car, and we actually pull a lot of data about from the existing marketplace about the VIN number, and we allow users to take ownership of that data. And then the whole business side of it and the developer platform that we’re kind of like re-launching in the next quarter is built on top of that. So there’s all different ways that can be expressed, but that’s kinda the high-level pitch for it.
: So I came from the mobility space broadly, but the last four years I was working specifically with companies in the autonomous vehicle world. My last job, I was running a fleet of about 400 employees that were working on the Waymo project. So I saw like very cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology and how it was improving over time. The company I worked for was called TransDev and they’re a big mobility systems operator.
So there’s a vision of the future where large chunks of highway driving can be fully automated, and that’s not too far away. In fact, I think if there was a clearer regulatory framework for how to support something like that, and a company like Tesla was willing to take some minimal amount of risk on it, then that could be true for say, like L.A. to San Francisco — about 90 percent of that trip could be 100 percent automated, and far safer than human driving today.
So yeah, we have a lot of thoughts on it, and one of the ways we think about it at DIMO is we’re helping users collect and save their own data, and that really is only to the benefit of the end user. It’s very important for you to [be able to] do that. I saw a lot of situations in my previous job where the data from a connected car was immensely important because of an incident that happened on the road.
EVANNEX: That kind of speaks to this idea of DIMO being open-source and decentralized — I don’t know if you’d specifically use that term. But can you tell me a little bit about why you think it’s important for this platform to be open-source and have an emphasis on the consumer and their own data?: I would describe DIMO as being a progressively decentralizing thing.