WirelessCar delivers connected mobility services to 12+ vehicle OEMs in 100+ markets globally with 99.99% uptime on AWS with teams based out of Sweden, USA and China. WirelessCar is an AWS partner with more than 20 years of experience in building connected vehicle services. WirelessCar has commoditized connected mobility services on AWS with API products, cost optimizations and building a flywheel and economies of scale with AWS. WirelessCar has now connected over 10 million vehicles to their platform and is ramping up towards 100 million with single digit and lower cost per car per year on AWS.

This blog post highlights how WirelessCar built modular API products, achieved cost optimizations and built economies of scale with AWS to commoditize connected mobility services.

Background

As vehicle OEMs continue their digital transformation, they are becoming software development organizations and thus the way they consume services from software suppliers will change. They are changing from organizations that specify requirements and order functionality from their suppliers into development teams building their own software in-house. It is not sustainable for everyone to build everything from scratch themselves every time, so the teams rely on buying non-differentiating functionality from suppliers. When the consumers of such sourced software are shifting to internal development teams at the OEMs, they expect to be able to consume the software as they do with public cloud services. This means they do not expect to receive software packages that they need to install and operate themselves but consume an API-based product delivered by the supplier in a SaaS model. This way, OEM development teams get self-service access to instantiate products, troubleshoot integrations, follow-up on usage and billing, manage access and data. As a result, bottlenecks will be removed and enable the OEMs to increase their speed of innovation.

WirelessCar API products

WirelessCar provides cloud-based, fully managed connected mobility API products in a SaaS manner. Using ready-made managed API products instead of building and maintaining it themselves, allows OEMs to focus on delivering differentiating features, reduce total cost of ownership and gain economies of scale. For any customization or consultation needs, WirelessCar offers professional services and discovery services. OEMs choose to adopt the whole suite of WirelessCar products as a complete solution to provide their customers connected mobility services, or any products they want to adopt and integrate in their existing platform using APIs. Therefore, both existing OEM platforms and new OEM platforms are adopting all or any of the WirelessCar API products.

WirelessCar provides API products in six different areas of connected mobility.

1. Connectivity: Products that provide connectivity to vehicles and lifecycle management.
2. Journey intelligence: This area includes products that cover position and journey statistics, data lakes, digital companion, driver monitoring and coaching use cases.
3. Safety and security: This covers call center services, stolen vehicle tracking and vehicle security alert services.
4. Electric vehicles (EVs): Smart EV Routing, smart charging and digital EV companion services that are one of reliable EV services in the automotive industry.
5. Shared mobility: In this area, WirelessCar provides fleet management, fleet data access and digital management services.
6. Digital transformation: Logistic tracking, corporate car management, remote diagnostic and predictive maintenance are some of the latest services covered under this area.

WirelessCar and AWS are working together to develop new products in the edge to cloud, security, data and machine learning areas to name a few. OEMs are adopting WirelessCar services and build their services on top, using WirelessCar service APIs.

Figure 1: WirelessCar API products architecture diagram

WirelessCar products help OEMs to ingest data from vehicles, factories, customer relationship management systems or other end points securely. OEMs subscribe to these APIs by contacting WirelessCar. WirelessCar provides detailed documentation about API usage. OEMs start consuming APIs in weeks, instead of months or years to use the service. WirelessCar products use AWS managed and serverless services Amazon API gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS IoT Core and many more to scale infrastructure cost efficiently and reduce DevOps efforts. DevOps efforts are reduced with building WirelessCar services as infrastructure as code and building continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Logging, monitoring and alerts services are provided using Amazon CloudWatch. AWS security and access management services Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS WAF, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS security hub, AWS Shield and other services are used to ensure security and access management. This way, WirelessCar provides modular API products to OEMs to consume connected mobility services. AWS and WirelessCar are working towards making these services available on AWS marketplace in the future. This enables anyone to start using WirelessCar products off the shelf.

Cost optimizations

Cost optimization is not a one-time exercise, but becomes part of a company’s culture and gets embedded in DevOps teams to develop cost efficient solutions. Cost in mobility workloads depends on the vehicle communication pattern, how many mobility services are used by vehicles and responses requested by vehicle. Therefore, cost for each OEM will differ, as these three parameters will vary from OEM to OEM. Cost optimization started with identifying the costs per OEM program, WirelessCar service, and AWS services. WirelessCar and AWS used cost logs and Amazon QuickSight to visualize costs and created matrices like cost per car per year, cost per message and more. Now WirelessCar had a way to track costs in near real time and measure outcomes. It is important to note that WirelessCar has a consistent tagging strategy for all AWS resources to make cost visualizations possible. WirelessCar was able to to reduce costs in two ways.

1. Identify easy wins, without changing architecture or creating the need for big efforts and putting governance around cloud resource usage. These things were, for example, cleaning unused resources and data, changing from IO2 to IO3 Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes to reduce costs, using AWS EC2 Graviton instances for compute and databases to reduce costs.
2. Review ways in which each AWS service was used and identified cost optimization actions and re-factoring. These efforts were planned by WirelessCar teams in their sprints and implemented over the course of time, as feature implementations take priority.

The cost optimization campaign at WirelessCar made WirelessCar teams aware about their choices. Now, WirelessCar teams track their developed service costs with QuickSight and act on cost optimizations. WirelessCar customers benefit directly from these reduced costs. In this way, WirelessCar provides cost efficient API products to OEMs.

Building economies of scale

More than 20 years of experience, cost-optimized superior API products, AWS partnership and go-to-market strategies have helped bring more and more OEMs onto WirelessCar’s products. WirelessCar is onboarding customers in weeks on their platform, instead of months and years. Existing mobility platforms are adopting WirelessCar services to fill the gaps, especially in the area of EV services. WirelessCar and AWS are working together to bring new services to market.

This is bringing thousands of new vehicles each week globally onto WirelessCar’s products. This is helping to build a flywheel and economies of scale, which—in turn—is reducing cost per vehicle and benefiting WirelessCar customers. We are aiming to onboard 100 million vehicles and commoditizing connected mobility services together.

Figure 2: WirelessCar flywheel

Conclusion

In this blog post we have learned how WirelessCar and AWS worked together to commoditize connected mobility services using API products, cost optimizations and economies of scale. Please reach out to contact WirelessCar to learn more. Learn more about AWS offerings at the AWS for automotive page, or contact your AWS team today.