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- Mat Yarger gave a presentation for MOBI on the current efforts of the IOTA Foundation in the mobility industry.
- According to Yager, Jaguar Land Rover is one of our most important partners in this area, while the company is “endlessly supporting the IOTA Foundation”.
At an event for the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), Mat Yarger (Head of Mobility & Automotive), Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen (Head of Global Trade & Supply Chains) and Dan Simerman (Head of Finance Relations) from the IOTA Foundation gave a presentation about IOTA and provided interesting insights.
MOBI is a member-led consortium working to make transport more environmentally friendly, efficient and affordable through the use of blockchain and related technologies. Through research, innovation platforms and working groups, MOBI works to create and promote an industry standard for the adaptation of intelligent mobility blockchain solutions.
Members of the consortium include BMW, Continental, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Renault, Bosch, as well as major technology companies such as Accenture and IBM, and blockchain companies such as ConsenSys, Hyperledger, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Ripple and the IOTA Foundation.
IOTA in the automotive industry
Mat Yarger explained that Jaguar Land Rover is one of the most important partners of the IOTA Foundation for the automotive industry. The company has developed a car wallet for its I-Pace vehicles in 2019, which can send and receive payments for digital and physical services, and can communicate with other cars and third-party services such as parking, tolls and marketplaces.
One of our top partner is Jaguar Land Rover, they are endlessly supporting what we are doing and we are very happy working with them on a lot of different mechanisms for integrating IOTA in decentralized technologies of vehicles.
The wallet provides a standardized mechanism for performing small transactions in near real-time that are secure, have audit trails and can be verified. The technology can be used for communication with toll infrastructure, for intelligent parking or for usage-based taxes. The wallet collects data on how many kilometers and on which roads a vehicle has driven and what toll infrastructure it has passed.
As Yarger further explained, the IOTA Foundation has extended its partnership with Jaguar Land Rover through a test case with the city of Trondheim. In the city, both partners are working together within the EU “Horizon 2020” grant and the CityxChange consortium. However, the Horizon 2020 project is much larger and includes 32 partners and 11 test cases, on which the IOTA Foundation is working.
At the moment it is still difficult to trace energy back to its origins, especially renewable energies. However, the ability to do so opens up business opportunities, such as carbon credit tokenization and dynamic pricing based on origin. As a result, IOTA, Trondheim and Jaguar Land Rover have developed a solution:
A joint project developed by IOTA, JLR, and Engie Labs at the energy-positive Powerhouse building in Trondheim Norway uses IOTA’s immutable DLT to create a tamper-proof record of all energy transactions and sources at the building. This information is then shown in the dashboard of the I-Pace vehicle so the user can see the origin of the energy being used to charge the car.
Furthermore, EladNL has developed a plug and play solution for charging e-cars in cooperation with the IOTA Foundation. This reduces friction points as the charging cable can be simply plugged in without having to set up an account with a provider beforehand. The entire charging process up to payment is handled by the Tangle and a wallet integrated in the car.
Another project that appealed to Yarger and which is interesting for MOBI is the Alvarium project with the Linux Foundation, Dell and others. Alvarium creates an open, vendor-neutral middleware stack where multiple IOTA products act as base technologies and form the trust layer so that companies can trust the immutability of data. Yarger explained:
This project will be committed as open source code to the Linux Foundation in the vry near future and this project has been actively accelerating very rapidly. The real impact here from MOBI’s perspective is to look at this in perspective of this mobility network […] it is not just vehicles, it is also infrastructure in smart cities, it’s multiple stakeholders […] there’s a lot of interoperability that’s required here. This is something that s working on scaling with multiple partners in the hardware industry and we are talking multiple testbeds.
Below is the full presentation, which also includes the supply chain and tokenization parts. The mobility industry part starts at 20:10.
