Connected Cars to Spawn $14.5 Billion Data Industry

Messages exchanged among 152 million connected cars and their environment will generate more than 11 petabytes of data per year by 2020, creating some $14.5 billion in potential Big Data value worldwide, according to IHS Automotive.

That data volume compares with a relatively modest 480 terabytes 15 megabytes per second collected globally this year from some 26 million connected cars.

The smallest useful piece of electronic data is one byte. A terabyte is one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes. A petabyte is one thousand terabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

By 2020, connected cars will be generating 30 terabytes of data per day, or 350 megabytes per second, according to IHS's Emerging Technologies: Big Data in the Connected Car report.

Connected-car data is currently being used internally for vehicle diagnostics, location, speed and status. By 2020, the four most important categories of such information will be diagnostics, location, user experience and adaptive drive assistance and autonomy.

IHS notes that fundamental unresolved questions in the potential new industry is who owns the data, the channels through which it flows and the analytics.