Toyota Teams up with Connectivity Partner Motorq
New platform created to improve performance of fleet-driven businesses
As we head into the final quarter of 2019, it’s looking like connectivity is becoming the buzzword of the automaker and car rental industry, especially with the strides made public since the beginning of the year.
Avis painstakingly explained its motives in taking this high-tech path as a means to increasing company efficiency and boost customer service. Other players are using connectivity as a means to making autonomous vehicles more foolproof on their way to achieving commercial availability in a few years. For many others, it’s a sophisticated way of data mining to get more insight into consumer driving habits, tastes, preferences and other customer details designed to solidify target audiences.
Toyota announced that it’s pairing up with Motorq, a company that specializes in creating connected-car platforms, to help fleet-driven companies and Toyota vehicle managers get more business-oriented information from their vehicles. While neither party was specific about what type of information would be retrieved, both echoed sentiments that such data would be instrumental in improving the performance of any client who would take advantage of the analytics-oriented product.
Motorq’s cloud-based software seems similar to other similar car-connectivity innovations. The technology can track vehicular location, driver performance, assess a vehicle’s need for maintenance and upgrading and can mobilize support for any incidents involving the automobile. It’s being marketed as a convenience for fleet operational staff to negate the need to install their own technology to access the data. The Motorq product does all that work for them anyway.
“Making the information seamless and secure for the customer entails deep integration between Motorq’s platform and Toyota’s technology infrastructure,” said Arun Rajagopalan, CEO and co-founder of Motorq. “We are thrilled to be working with Toyota Motor North America and Toyota Connected to help customers unlock the full potential of the data generated by Toyota vehicles.”
“Motorq’s solution adds significant value to the overall benefit of choosing connected Toyota vehicles for our fleet customers,” said Mark McClung with the Connected Strategy group at Toyota Motor North America. “We’re always seeking ways to help our fleet customers move their businesses forward, and Motorq does just that.”
As for assessing what information cannot be used to advance a company’s level of performance, Motorq added that its data processing is subject to what content us useable via what the company calls its consent-management system. None of the innovations are used without consent from the operators who purchase the platform in accordance with Toyota’s own privacy measures detailed in the Automotive Consumer Privacy Protection Principles.