Circle of Hot Circle affair cold OBD the future of the box where the road

The hottest thing in the field of car networking this year is OBD.

In the past, the development of the car has been a little confused, is the projection mode or other has not been conclusive. GPS navigation for many years also slowly began to appear to be replaced by the trend of mobile phones. Last year, the cloud dog that burst the fire not to anticipate, also will slowly toward the second half of the life cycle.

and OBD fire. In the intelligent hardware of the tuyere, "Hardware + cloud + smartphone" mode is tried, OBD collection of car data, data uploaded to the cloud, mobile phone app for application display and further excavation after the service market, this is basically all OBD routines.

Earlier Ray technology also combed the OBD of several categories of players (see article: OBD break the car information Island into contention): including the internet giant (Tencent Lobo), auto manufacturers (equipment), hardware manufacturers, insurance companies and operators. Basic features include car navigation, driving data, vehicle data, life services, security and even social networking, telling stories about getting the car "big data" and using it for service or insurance.

But outside a small OBD box has n a problem that can not be opened, perhaps destined to be only a transition product. The biggest problem with the OBD box is that it can't really be connected to the car, it's just a peripheral, which leads to problems

One is that the OBD box can be placed in a very awkward position. Because the depot originally used OBD as a diagnostic interface for later repairs, is not open to users themselves, so often OBD is hidden in the bridge of some difficult to find places, and even need to pull out the panel to see, some plug in OBD after the inconvenience, even driving is inconvenient, This affected the use of the user, but the depot did not improve the desire, the depot is more willing to do the OBD built in front.

Second, OBD can read the information is very embarrassing. Many owners think that OBD can read things, on the computer, I also get a mobile phone to receive and watch the information, what is more important, OBD generally for third-party manufacturers to provide, these manufacturers generally do not get the manufacturer's private agreement data, read the contents of the public agreement, Some of the most valuable private fault code, or only the iphone store those valuable manufacturers terminal to read. This leads to OBD's practical value.

Third is the current Third-party OBD can only read cannot write. Actually some of the obstacles can be done in a soft way, but like the above problem, the third party is unable to write, this is also the protection mechanism of the car manufacturers, if the third party can write, the car was damaged. The car is a more safety-conscious gadgets, and mobile phones, computers casually to toss different, it is said that there are third-party OBD and car matching did not do enough, resulting in the car-driving computer broke down.

Four is the lack of service after the shutdown problem. After the ignition, people in the car, in fact, there are many convenient ways to view the condition, OBD data to the phone's way seems smart, in fact, more trouble, so it stands to reason that people are not in the car can remotely master the situation of the car more meaningful, but unfortunately, now basically all of the OBD after the shutdown into standby state, the driving computer is closed, OBD box should also rest, so leave the car scene under the OBD did not play a role.

Just as wearing a bracelet is difficult to carry over three months, these practical problems, so that OBD actual use rate is very low, many people start fresh, often after the shelved. OBD use rate is low, directly bring a problem, OBD follow-up business model can not be sustained, if a product itself does not give people too many additional functions, but also to waste resources to upload data, constitute a tall business model, it is difficult to think of the following.

OBD's most promising business model-personalized insurance services, based on large data to analyze how much a car discount, which requires a long time to provide data, but this often involves privacy information, in fact, many owners are very taboo, their own driving routes can be insurance companies know, where the night, where the day, In order to offer to expose their whereabouts, such a choice is really difficult to say.

So, although the OBD box is hot, but I think it is a transitional product, the real car networking is based on the automotive industry standards, in the car built-in upload equipment, whether open by the customer decision, this road is still far.