What We Cover

The diverse transportation venue includes personal vehicles, commercial vehicles, off-highway (e.g. construction, agricultural) and non-vehicular transport such as aircraft, rail/transit, and ships/boats (including containers).  At its most fundamental state, transportation is defined in terms of the devices and players who interact with or contribute to the movement of payloads from point A to B. Payloads can be segmented into the movement of people or the movement of objects, or a combination of the two.

Transportation systems include telematics and mobile communications with vehicles and trucks. Navigation, vehicle diagnostics, and supply chain integration are some of the services possible with remote connectivity.

Applications associated with these segments include toll systems, congestion management, and passenger or fleet operator information services such as road pricing schemes, congestion charges, weather data for routing optimization, supply chain management software and fleet management. 

Harbor’s Transportation & Automotive Outlook

One of the fundamental underpinnings of any economy, the timely movement of people and goods around the globe, is of paramount importance. As evidenced by disruptions ranging from labor conflicts in ports in the US or truck drivers in France, even a minor stoppage can have enormous financial consequence.

The ways in which we move people and things from point A to B is a foundational component of our economies and livelihoods.  Similarly, there is a premium that can be extracted beyond simply moving things from point A to point B if you can provide the information about the status and expected delivery time, as shown by the global courier services like FedEx and UPS. Given the need to track, and often secure, the flow of goods in a global economy, companies are looking more and more toward connectivity and machine intelligence to shed light on the opaque periods of transit while at the same time monitoring the state of the people and vehicles actually carrying the item.

We’re fast approaching the point at which the number of people and things requiring transportation exceeds our ability to move them efficiently through our current channels and vehicles. Looking forward, the answer to this systemic problem lies in much closer collaboration between transportation players involved in transporting payloads, or what Harbor refers to as ”transportation ecosystems.”

To create true transportation ecosystems, it comes down to data and the value added applications that can be built from that data. This requires a much higher degree of embedded connectivity within the vehicles as well as open data standards that facilitate the use of the data across players. In the near-term, expect the bulk of movement in the development of ecosystems to come from On-Road Vehicle startups acting as data brokers between the OEMs and developers building applications from vehicle data.