New Stellantis arm formed to gather data from 34 million vehicles

Stellantis has set up a new standalone business unit dedicated to the collection and licensing of data captured from the firm's connected vehicles – expected to number 34 million by 2030. The new division, called Mobilisights, is expected to play a core role in Stellantis's objective of generating €20 billion from software initiatives by the end of the decade. Chiefly, Mobilisights will be charged with building Stellantis's data-as-a-service (DAAS) business model, whereby data can be captured from products and services from across the firm's portfolio to inform the development and improvement of new ones. Through Mobilisights, Stellantis will offer captured data to "a diverse set of entities" including private- and public-sector organisations, research bodies and education facilities. This will foster "data-driven decision making" and enable "a wide-ranging portfolio of applications and services", said Stellantis. The formation of Mobilisights is a significant step towards Stellantis achieving the objectives laid out in 2021 in its ambitious Dare Forward strategy for 2030. Mobilisights will hold the access and licensing rights to all data gathered from the 14 brands in the Stellantis portfolio. As well as enhancing Stellantis's ability to supply data, the formation of Mobilisights as a dedicated data-capturing division means it can operate with greater autonomy when it comes to accruing data for its own purposes, reducing its dependence on external suppliers. Stellantis says data gathered and supplied by Mobilisights will be held in accordance with "a very strict data governance and privacy policy". Data will be anonymised and aggregated and customers will be asked for consent in the event that Stellantis wants to share their personal data. Customers will be able to opt out of data collection and sharing. Mobilisights CEO Sanjiv Ghate, previously head of Stellantis's data business unit, said: "The vision for Mobilisights is to contribute to a smarter world, leveraging the insights that vehicle data provide to inspire innovative applications and services that can transform and dramatically improve the day-to-day lives of users and businesses. “Harnessed effectively, sensor and other data available from connected vehicles can enable a wide range of services and applications with compelling benefits, ranging from personalised usage-based insurance to road-hazard detection and traffic management. "With its 14 iconic brands and millions of connected vehicles, Stellantis has unmatched global data scale capable of powering this business forward.” Stellantis hasn't yet said how lucrative it expects this new business to be, but it plans to invest a total of €30bn (£26.5bn) in various software initiatives in the run up to 2026 - a signal of its confidence in this new sphere.