Creating a New Era of Car Customization: The App Store for Your Vehicle

The cars of today are becoming more mobile data center than traditional vehicle. As we enter the era of Software Defined Vehicles, software is at the center of the experience, but the Vehicle manufacturers haven't been known for their software chops. So let's talk to someone solving this problem.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.

Today we are talking with Alex Rawitz, Co-Founder of Dimo. Dimo is an open source platform designed to connect drivers with their data. By doing this they are creating an app store platform that is vendor agnostic, opening up a whole world of new functionality in your car.

Welcome Alex

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Transcript

The cars of today have become more mobile data center than traditional vehicle.

And as we enter the era of software defined vehicles, software is at the center of the experience.

But vehicle manufacturers haven't been known for their software chops.

So let's talk to someone solving this problem.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here.

Welcome to another FUTR podcast.

Today we're talking with Alex Rawits, co-founder of Dimo.

Dimo is an open source platform designed to connect drivers with their data.

By doing this they are creating an app store platform that is vendor agnostic, opening up a whole new world of functionality in your car.

So let's talk to Alex and find out all about it.

Welcome Alex.

Really excited about being here Chris, thank you for having me.

I mentioned the fact that, you know, software-defined vehicles are on the uptick here.

What is the future of software-defined vehicles? Well first let's start off with what a software-defined vehicle is.

Yes, let's start there.

And that is this notion that's kind of emerged and it's become a huge talking point in the automotive industry.

But the idea that vehicles are going to be primarily upgraded, primarily run, primarily just managed through software.

So the automakers themselves and individuals are actually going to be spending less time tinkering with the nuts and bolts and more time tinkering with the bytes.

The bytes and bits.

Yeah, yeah, the bytes and bits.

One kind of example that I like to give is, you know, remember a time when you might take out your radio and you know you could customize the car in all kinds of ways.

That is now happening but in code.

And people who buy new cars today are experiencing for the first time that their car gets a software update when it's parked in the garage at night.

And that is sort of the broad transition.

And what we're seeing is that there is a lot of different nuances to how that's going to play out.

I've got a new vehicle, a Volkswagen ID.4, and it is very software-centric.

There's so much.

I mean, I've got the LEDs and I've got this and I've got that.

And it being an all-electric vehicle, that, like you say, is really different than sort of the internal combustion engine vehicles I've had in the past, right? It's very different.

And what the automakers, the OEMs, are trying to do is to build more and more software functionality into their cars.

There was a bunch of news recently.

BMW came out and said, "Oh, we're going to add a heated seat subscription so that if you wanted to add your credit card information, you could unlock the heated seats." Tesla, of course, has been doing that with their full self-driving software for a while now.

And they've been doing it with range too because they've had, in the past I know, they've equipped with more batteries than they actually utilize based on sort of a... And there was a recent lawsuit coming out about that.

So we'll see where that one takes us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Not quite matching up.

But the automakers, and we talked about the future of the software-defined vehicle, the automakers, they want to own all the software.

So if you buy a GM vehicle, you're only going to have access to GM apps and GM features.

And if GM decides to do heated seats, well, you're going to get heated seats controlled by software.

If GM decides to do usage-based insurance, you're going to get the GM usage-based insurance package based on their software.

And all of these automakers want to build their own software stack and their own vertical ecosystem where if you're a customer of that piece of hardware, of that car, you're going to have your experience dictated by how good they are at building software, maintaining software, and updating that software.

Which they have not been known to be great at.

Which these are companies that have spent, in some cases, a century building hardware and maybe 10 years building software.

So we like to believe at Demo that the future of the software-defined vehicle is actually much more open.

In fact, many of these vehicles could one day run open-source code.

And what that would lead to, in our mind, is a much more consumer-centric vision of the future where you as a driver or vehicle owner could actually choose what kind of software you want to run for parts of your car or across multiple cars.

And you can actually have a much more customized experience for being an owner.

When I look at the licenses for my car, it's really based on a lot of open-source.

So you're not far off in saying that they're going to be based on open-source.

But to me, what's happening in this car market seems to parallel the phone market, like when the iPhone came out.

And I feel like I think of my electric car much like I think of my phone in the sense that I've got to kind of, when I'm not using it, I just throw it on the charger.

There's a lot of parallels.

And you talk about having an app store and software and apps and things like that.

It really is converging in that way.

And we think the model where you buy a device like a phone, and it's a good example because imagine you were locked into only the iPhone apps.

You could only use their notepad.

Well, you used to be locked into the Nokia phones or you get locked into the Sprint phone with whatever they're delivering.

Right.

And no one likes the idea that you're locked into just that hardware.

And you can't use any other apps.

The whole magic of having an iPhone these days is you get the access, or for an Android, you get access to thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of apps that give you every flavor of notepad and whatever social media that you want.

And the same notion can be true for vehicles.

When you think about how you go, like your vehicle's life cycle, you need to keep track of maintenance.

You might be using your data in insurance purposes.

You could be using your car for car sharing.

You could be actually connecting your vehicle to applications that are safety centric for a family.

Like all of these things, you could get stuck.

If we see the OEMs taking control, you could get stuck in a world where you can only use the Toyota version on a Toyota.

Or you could live in a world where any of the developers of the world that want to build mobility applications could actually market their version of the predictive maintenance or their version of the safety application to anyone with a VW or GM or Toyota, etc.

>> We talked earlier, and I mentioned beyond just sort of enhancing what's already there, replacing what's there actually has benefit.

Because like I was explaining, my VW has an app that comes with it, but it's not -- it doesn't work like a typical app you would expect.

Because it's got an ability to notify you when the door's open or the car locks or unlocks, right? But sometimes those come like an hour after the fact, which is extraordinarily confusing.

When I first got it, it started like freaking me out because I'm like, "Who's in my car? Who's in my car? I've got to go out to the garage and check." So it's not beneficial.

And I know that these are not the most reliable apps, but they're also not on the most reliable networks either, right? >> Right.

And we're already seeing the adverse effects of just the connectivity challenges around connecting cars in general.

Earlier this year, a bunch of cars that were initially connected via 3G had to be sunset.

So these were people who had some connectivity to their car, and they saw the car lose connectivity because it was on 3G, and that was sunset.

And what ends up happening in those instances is that whether you're a consumer who's just using it to kind of keep track of things, it's not that important to you just for fun, or whether you really are dependent on that from, let's say, a work standpoint, and this is a fleet of yours that is connected, you're now losing out because some aspect of the technology has been phased out and can't really be upgraded in a cohesive way.

And to your point of what kind of notifications and alerts are you getting from your particular car, right now you have just what VW is able to provide or wants to provide.

And the same way that in your smart home, if you're one of those people, you can use all kinds of software to customize the types of alerts and settings and things you have in your home, we think the same should be available to people within their cars.

It's probably the second most expensive thing most people own after their home, and why not have that level of customization on the technology? I think the introduction of choice into the matter is really awesome.

And I like the, you know, like, going back to that iPhone analogy, you know, it wasn't until the iPhone had the iTunes Store and the App Store that it really took off.

And I think we're kind of sitting on the edge of something like that right now, too, right? I think that's what's going to happen with connected vehicles as a whole.

And that's why even though most car makers have had an app out for somewhere between three to eight years, even some of them, you talk to the average person and they either never heard of the fact that their car could have an app with it, or most of them say, I never really use it, or I use it every now and then for once in a while I start my car in the winter.

And we don't think that from our perspective at Fimo, connected cars are not going to have that real aha moment until people start scrolling through a list of, wow, here's 100 applications, where there's 10 different maintenance apps that I can pick to get an instant quote on this error code that I just scanned.

And now there's 15 games I can sign into and do a landmark challenge who's going to visit all the landmarks.

All of these things that could be powered with an open connected vehicle platform are really going to help people understand what it means when we say, oh, this data center on wheels is doing more than sending a GPS point that you can see in your car.

I think at some point there's going to be that killer app that everybody's just going to, I got to get that.

I saw that in my buddy's car and I got to have that too, right? Yeah.

Let's dig into a little bit about like how Dimo works because, you know, I think there's a group of people who when they heard me make the analogy to the phone and the app store went, oh my God, that sounds scary.

Right? You know, I'm like, wow, that sounds cool.

But a lot of people I'm sure are like, ah, that's something scary to, you know, people getting into my car and stuff.

Right? More connected things rightfully scares almost anyone.

Right.

It's another thing to keep track of.

It's another password.

It's another thing with some data.

It has GPS locations there.

There's a lot of reasons to be to be a little bit fearful of connected vehicle technology.

If you're one of those people that wants to keep it at arm's length and you can always go and get a car, it's 10, 15 years old.

Should you can still keep it running? The other thing from our perspective or the other side of that conversation to us is.

As a user, you should own your own data.

So my car today sends data back to Toyota.

If I want to use their connected services, I could allow them to continue to harvest my data and give me some of it back in the form of the not too bad Toyota app.

Or I could actually collect my own data, store it with DEMO and then decide on a case by case basis.

Do I want to send some of the data to the repair partners so that I can get a quote? Do I want to send some to my insurance company so that they can give me a discount and so on? Well, and I got to imagine that the idea behind DEMO is really to create a standardized platform and standardized framework.

And in that sort of a scenario, you can build it with security in mind.

You can build security into the platform.

So you're not trusting GM to build the world's greatest security app.

Then you're dealing with a software company that is taking security seriously and is developers and it's a developer centric sort of environment to really drive that.

Yes.

And our team has worked at some of the large automakers.

And so we're familiar with some of the best enterprise best practices around security on vehicles.

But every large automaker has had some kind of a data breach at some point.

It's not their core competency, right? Software.

It's not their core competency.

And so I think the approach is really no different than it is in almost any other part of your life where every new technology you use is going to come with some risk associated with it.

And the most protective thing you can do is either to try to assert your own control, is to make sure that the technology you're using has a lot of permission layers, has a lot of privacy layers.

And we've been adding both of those types of layers to the app since the very beginning when we allow users to create privacy zones that protect their data encrypted from end to end.

And also that like the very way that we are building, sharing and sort of downloading applications is that you'll have to approve and manage every single relationship that you want through the demo app store.

So if you are actually using the marketplace and you're sharing some data with a repair partner, like the terms of that are very clear and evident to you as a user.

And while that can sound like a lot to manage, it's actually just it's a user experience thing.

You can make it really easy for users to understand where their data is going, who's using what, and very, very, very easy to revoke.

I think that's one of the most important things that the data can be easily revocable.

Yeah.

And if you look at the smartphone market, I mean, we're already doing that.

Way, way bigger amounts of data.

That's one of my favorite things when people say, oh, I would never want to connect my car.

It would take all my data.

It's like, well, are you carrying a phone around in your pocket? Because if you've been carrying one of those around for the last 10 years, like most other people, then there's a lot of people that already have that data.

I'm always fascinated by people who worry about being tracked by, you know, weird things appearing in their blood.

And yet they walk around with a cell phone on them 24 hours a day.

Yeah.

And to be clear, like we are not advocating for just like, hey, give it all up.

Let everyone see it.

Put all your data out in the open.

But I think that there is a certain pragmatism.

I think most of us, like we want a pragmatic approach to that where it's like you as a user could probably like all these companies.

There's an article came out in the markup about a year ago, about 37.

At the time, they counted 37 companies that are somehow collecting your mobility data one way or another.

And I'm sure it's more than that.

Yeah, it's probably grown now.

Like we're not saying that DEMO is this silver bullet that can neutralize all of that, but it restores some power back to the user.

None of those companies are giving any of that access back to users.

And it actually is parallel to another part of the auto industry that we really want to try to help shift some power back to the average driver.

And that's just in like the dealer market and in the mechanic market.

I think, you know, we've we've talked to car dealerships and technology companies in that space that like brag about how much power and insight they can give to a dealer over a consumer.

Like, wait, shouldn't you be trying to do it the other way around? Shouldn't we be trying to get drivers more of this data and information and not give it all to the dealers? Like, in all of these instances, can we totally shift the tide? Probably not.

But can we bring a bunch of power back to the consumers? We really believe so.

I got to imagine this is going to be a major upset for the whole automotive market because it's going to necessarily change a lot of things.

First of all, you're going to have to have software people in the shop to repair cars rather than mechanics.

Right.

And you're going to have to have people with different types of skill sets around that as well.

So, you know, not that.

And plus, I think that's ultimately going to lead to the changing of how the distribution and sales model works.

And, you know, people are going to want that Tesla model more where it's just like I can buy it on my phone.

The auto industry is probably going through the largest general transition in 100 years.

And that's because it is it's right now experiencing multiple what would be each themselves a transformative change, multiple ones happening at once.

So we have the electrification.

I mean, the transition to electric vehicles is rewriting the way we think about infrastructure, you know, towards electrification across the country.

The connected vehicles that, you know, of course, we've been talking about and software defined vehicles, rewriting the way we think about things.

It's going to have, as you mentioned, effects on getting, you know, getting maintenance.

The same place you get your oil change is probably not going to be able to reconfigure and recalibrate your ADAS system.

And then, of course, there's autonomy on the far horizon.

And several of my co-founders came out of the autonomous vehicle industry and have thought a lot about some of the problems that that kind of appear, as you think further into the future there.

But all of these pieces are really, really driving a ton of, I would say, anxiety, but also opportunity.

And we're seeing a lot of the automakers, interestingly, go in different directions.

We forget sometimes there's 20 or 30, like, large, large, large automaker companies in the world.

And when you have that much diversity, you see companies that are going in different directions, some that are trying to take more control, some that are trying to give more control to users.

And it's a really exciting time, honestly, to be building in the automotive space, because we have these, what amount to trillion dollar industries across the globe that are going through massive transformations.

>> When I go to get my ID4, there's only three guys in the whole shop who can work on the ID4, you know? And from my understanding is it doesn't pay as well to be an electric car mechanic as it does to be an internal combustion engine mechanic as well.

>> I think that that's probably going to change as just the number of electric vehicles on the road shift.

>> And the level of specialization needed, too.

>> Right.

And I think that that probably even could even vary market to market at the moment.

But it's going to be -- the other thing to keep in mind also with all these transitions is that the average car on the road is about 13 years old.

And sometimes I think in some states it goes up to 17 or 18 years old.

In some states it's a little bit lower, just under 10.

But even if 5% of the cars sold this year are electric vehicles, which I think would be the highest number in the U.S.

ever, you're going to have a long tail -- you're going to have a decade of EV theft.

A decade of ICE vehicles that are still coming out.

And for that transition to really flip in the day-to-day of servicing vehicles, it's going to take another -- whatever happens now is going to take 10 years really to transition into the future.

>> Yeah, I mean, I live in a place where the electrification is happening really pretty fast.

I mean, I would say, you know, a good 30% of the cars I see on the road have to be electric.

You know, it's quite a big number, but it is going to take a while for it to filter through the whole country.

>> I'm personally pretty bullish on electric vehicles.

I think it's going to be one of those things where our kids one day are going to say, like, "You went to a gas station once a week? You had to leave your house with an unfilled car and go someplace else?" Like, my car is always ready.

>> Your car ran on explosions? That's crazy.

>> They're going to think it's absolutely crazy.

You're going to be describing this to somebody in 20 years, and they're going to just find it mind-boggling that we thought it was normal and even question, like, could EVs supplant ICE vehicles? >> Well, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the LK99, you know, superconducting material, room-temperature superconducting.

I mean, if that -- I mean, I've heard that story a lot of times.

I got my hopes up way too many times to get too excited about this announcement.

But, I mean, if that were to come through, that would absolutely change the market on electrical vehicles, too.

>> I'm an optimist about those things, too, and I like to get excited about those.

There have been -- I can't even stop even counting the battery breakthroughs.

I think Toyota actually said a couple months ago that they had made this incredible battery breakthrough.

It seems like that story comes up every year as well.

>> Well, VW just announced a whole new thing of how they deposit the graphite on a thing, and it's, you know -- they've got a powder-drying system.

>> Science is going to win eventually.

Like, all these things will bear fruit, but it's just -- it's going to take a little time.

>> So tell me a little bit more about, like, Dimo is an Android app store or iOS app store app.

Can you tell me what goes into it? Let's start with the consumer side, and then we can talk about the manufacturer side.

>> The Dimo mobile app is a -- it's on Android and iPhone.

It's a mobile application that you can download and connect your car to this alternative connected car app.

So the first thing you have to ask yourself is, how do I connect my car to Dimo? And we have a couple of ways, and that is just due to the sheer diversity of the autospace.

So if you have a relatively new vehicle, you might be able to connect your car to Dimo just using software.

So the most common car on the network today are Teslas.

They have not only an extremely open API that you can pull a lot of data out of, they've created a very easy login experience for users so that when we, you know, built the Dimo mobile app, we could actually just patch that login experience directly into the Dimo mobile app, and if you own a Tesla, you can log in with your Tesla credentials.

You're downloaded and connected in a couple of minutes.

You have a long tail of other automakers that have some degree of connectivity enabled through software.

It varies a lot.

You know, Ford's connectivity is different than Toyota's.

With Ford, if you have the FordPass app, you can connect.

It's going to work.

It might depend on what model car you have, but it's going to work.

If you have FordPass, Toyota not only matters what kind of car you have, which Toyota, but also what subscription you have to the Toyota product.

So there's a lot of nuance there, and it can even come down to the trim level, like whether you have the premium trim or the base trim can affect whether your car can connect.

We're only talking about software connections so far, and as we mentioned, the average car on the road is 13 years old, doesn't have a software connection.

So what do you do in that case? In those instances, there is a hardware ecosystem.

So when we started out building Dimo and launched the first mobile app about a year and a half ago, we also launched a hardware product.

It's a very conventional OBD2 device.

That's the standard port that's in everybody's car.

It's federally mandated, right to repair laws have said the data's got to be available through this port, and you can plug in this device.

We collaborated with a manufacturer called AutoPi.

You plug in this device, and now all your data is going to show up in the Dimo mobile app.

Is that wireless? Just a curious.

So it's a wireless app or wireless box that transmits.

So the device that we have today actually uses 4G LTE.

So wherever you get cell service, it can store data down to itself.

It's actually a Raspberry Pi, so you can even run applications on the edge.

We can get into that fun world a little bit.

And our take is that we don't really want to be a hardware company.

We think that hardware is the commodity here, actually.

And so in the not-too-distant future, we'll be launching a second device, which we collaborated with a second manufacturer for.

And it'll be cheaper.

It'll have a lower connectivity throughput, but it will be basically lower cost to own.

Any hardware manufacturer can actually join the Dimo ecosystem.

We have an open hardware spec.

As long as you're meeting some of the hardware standards that we have, we think it's great that consumers are going to have choice.

We think it's going to be amazing when there's a Dimo-compatible dash cam, and when there's a Dimo-compatible backup battery in the car, all these things.

We just think any kind of one of these devices that you're using to enhance your car experience that's pulling data from the vehicle should just allow you to own that data and should create verified data.

>>You're mentioning some really interesting things here, because now we're getting kind of more into the home automation market, where you have that hub that connects all the different -- and then I've got Home App or whatever to access it.

When you mention batteries and other things like that, there's a lot of things that you buy third-party for your car, aftermarket stuff that you put on your car.

And then you have telemetry that you could start collecting and integrating with everything else.

That's an interesting market.

>>If you go to our website, into our shop, you'll actually see it's called the Dimo Smart Vehicle Hub.

And the device that we have today is extremely extensible.

You can attach a screen for the people who -- actually, I mentioned it's a Raspberry Pi.

One of the really cool things we've done as a test is put a Nintendo 64 emulator on the device.

You can attach a screen and then play N64 on the same device that you can use to read your error codes, which we think is pretty cool and pretty unique.

So we've really just taken this approach.

Imagine you could really build a composable IoT ecosystem built around your car the same way that people are doing in their homes.

And that's what we are working towards in building Dimo, is that whether you're an Uber driver who wants an internal and external dash cam and maybe a couple of phones and a couple of other safety devices, or you've got kids and you actually want to turn our device into a Wi-Fi hotspot and let them stream movies off of that, cars should be a lot more composable.

And some of that should be controlled by the user instead of what the OEMs want back to the software-defined vehicle where they say, "You get the features that we can provide and that's it." And as autonomy approaches and things like that, I mean, one, autonomy, I've got to imagine there already is right now different flavors of autonomous vehicles.

And being able to choose the one that you like or the one that's the best at that moment would be an interesting play.

But then you also think, well, if we've got to the point where we're choosing our favorite autonomy package, that car is really now something that you could focus on the more luxury aspects of it.

It's like, what do you do while the car's driving you somewhere? How do you entertain yourself? What's the environment like? Is it relaxing? Is it something – there's so much there that could be done.

Or another hypothetical is talking about the autonomous software itself.

And let's say you love the way a Mercedes drives, but they don't have particularly good self-driving software and you want to use the Subaru self-driving software because they've got a great lane-keeping system and it's nice and smooth or something like that.

They actually did a pretty good lane-keeping system.

Yeah, yeah.

Wouldn't it be cool if you weren't locked in to just the software of that car? And in fact, I use a really, really cool project called Kama AI.

I have one of their hardware devices in my car as well.

And it plugs into my Toyota's cruise control and lane-keeping system and it delivers a better experience.

So I've replaced the Toyota software with the Kama AI software and now I have a better self-driving experience in my Toyota.

So that to us is just the future that enables people to really customize their experience.

Well, and also on the end-user side, there's also the aspect of a fleet of vehicles for companies that have fleet vehicles.

And there's obviously a million different things you could do.

But if you are utilizing a fleet of vehicles, having the ability to have some portability in how you customize a vehicle between vehicles – Fleets are a really interesting facet of this whole conversation because the telematics and data collection industry around fleets has actually been quite a bit more robust.

And it's been around quite a bit longer than what we're talking about mostly on the consumer side for the average driver.

There's several large public companies in this space and there's been a tremendous amount of investment in developing fleet software for large fleets.

What we've found in building Fimo is there's been a major under-investment in tackling the low end of the market.

Sort of the average small business owner who has less than 100 vehicles.

They just haven't been super appealing to the enterprise fleet companies, number one.

And then number two, when you talk to those types of folks – and we've spoken with many and worked with many of them – one of the biggest complaints they have is just that all of the major fleet software just doesn't feel right-sized to them.

And they're typically going to only care about two or three really important features to them out of a feature set of 100.

And they're really averse to being locked into software or hardware.

And we're able to go to these fleets and say, "Hey, guess what? We have multiple kinds of hardware." It's not just one thing that you plug in.

You can pick the expensive stuff, you can pick the cheaper stuff, you can pick the stuff that comes with a dash cam.

Hardware is very configurable.

You can have a mix because you might have some cars in your fleet that need different things.

Which is why it's important to have something underlying that that's agnostic to vendor.

Right, exactly.

And then we can say, "Hey, look, your data is your own." If you decide that you want to use our mobile app to manage your whole fleet, great.

You've got all the data there.

It's yours.

But if you decide in a year that you want to upgrade and pay for one of the fleet management tools that's deployed on Demo and get more data analysis, more features, things like that, you'll be able to bring that year of data directly into that application.

It's all stored.

It's all easy to move, and it's portable on your behalf.

And if you decide a year later you want to switch to a different fleet client, that's right there built on Demo.

And if you decide that you want to share that data with a maintenance provider, all the data is at your fingertips as the fleet owner or fleet manager, instead of living in the enterprise's cloud.

So let's talk a little bit about what it looks like on the other side.

So like if I'm trying to develop apps for cars, or if I'm a car manufacturer and I want to say, "Screw all the development I've done on my own app, let's just go with this," right? What does that all look like? Yeah.

One of the things that developers – we'll start with developers and maybe we'll come around to the car manufacturers last year.

Developers – and we've spoken with many in the automotive market – they've described this particular cycle, this particular way that things are that really frustrates them.

And that is, let's say you wanted to build an app that consumes vehicle data directly from the OEM, directly from the car, in order to build, whether it's usage-based insurance or safety tools, whatever.

99 times out of 100, you have to go to the carmaker and you have to go to them one by one.

And these are big organizations.

You're not just walking into a shop and talking to the customer service rep.

There's some program and all the enterprise sort of bureaucracy that goes with that.

You've got to find a manager there and talk to the team.

And maybe they have APIs that are publicly available and not all the OEMs do.

And you're probably spending 18 to 36 months in a boardroom explaining what your use case is.

And they're going to tell you, "Well, it would be this data, but not that data," and blah, blah, blah.

And if you violate the conditions, at the end of the day, you're going to be given a contract that says, "Well, you have to pay us $5 or $10 a month per car, and that's just a developer, and that's just one automaker." Now you have to go do that with 20 or 30 other automakers, especially if you want to build an application that works across any one of these cars.

And we've heard from many developers that this is just a non-starter.

Like, "I'm not going to start working on a mobility application that consumes vehicle data because the barriers to entry in terms of getting access to data are just too high." And what we have felt is that, again, in order to deliver that consumer experience where a consumer can pick on the mobile app store any number of amazing car-focused applications, we need to make sure that developers can easily access the data from any car.

And so that's where we've gone about creating what we call the demo protocol, where we're setting and creating standards and definitions around things like, "What do you call a car? How do you define it? How should we store the data about that vehicle?" And really trying to create a standard so that any developer can show up to our API docs and say, "Okay, cool.

I want to build an app that's going to need GPS data and error code data and maintenance data and all these things.

That's how I can access that from a Volvo or Mercedes or BMW." Our goal from the very beginning and our belief from the beginning has been that Demos Killer app is actually the developer platform.

And so we're really excited about starting to work.

We're actually working with some of the very first developers today.

We're helping to provide them with grants to build on Demo.

There's a number of cool apps that we'll probably get to talk about in the next few months.

But it's important pieces of infrastructure that are just going to help make Demo more useful to more people.

There's going to be a rush to get there, too, because I think that we're already starting to see some of the car manufacturers look like dinosaurs.

And the worst — there's something about walking in, sitting in a car, and having that just crappy little infotainment system that just looks like a website from 1995.

Yep.

And they're going to have to learn that this is a major feature that people really want.

Some of the apps feel that way, too.

Yeah.

And our philosophy on that is that the automakers really want to win at providing the best car, the best experience to the driver.

The experience to the driver is going to say, "I will go back and get my next car with them." Yeah.

And something that's very, very important in the auto industry that's sort of an industry term is this term of conquest, where one automaker says, "Can I steal that customer from their loyalty from another brand?" If they really want to do the best job that they can at owning the future and selling the most cars, we think opening up their vehicles is going to be key.

So we imagine a world where — and it's interesting, the first people who have done this has really been Tesla, and they tend to lead the way when it comes to a lot of this software.

Tesla's opened up their API, and you now can see a few third-party apps.

In addition to Demo, there's TesLab and Nikola, and there's a couple of other apps that you can use that just tap into your Tesla data.

And we think that eventually the OEMs are going to realize you're better off giving your customers choice.

You're better off giving them the maximum number of apps that they possibly can use.

And you might still get to charge them for the connectivity.

It might still be $80 or $100, or some of the luxury automakers charge you like $200 or $300 a year to keep your car connected.

You can still potentially charge that fee, but the users are going to get to use an app that they actually like.

And that's going to matter more to them than the Lexus or Mercedes or BMW branding in the app.

All they're going to know is that this hardware, this Mercedes, BMW, Audi, whatever, comes with the ability to connect really cool software.

So tell me, I mean, this is all amazing stuff.

I mean, this is your kind of right place, right time with what you're doing here.

But what do you see is next for Demo? Where's the next place you're going? So after about a year and a half of having the mobile app live, we've crossed over 20,000 cars connected, and that's in the U.S., Canada, and across most of Europe.

So these are 20,000 drivers.

I think it's still mostly consumers, but we are starting to see some fleets that are really ramping up in their deployments with us.

It really is all about just continuing to refine that customer experience.

We're bringing more data to more people.

One of the key things that I and my team spend a lot of time on in particular is actually helping some of the partners and app developers that we're working with deploy their solutions directly to customers.

So we're launching more maintenance partners.

We're launching more financing partners.

We're launching actually a whole bunch of really interesting automotive specialized services, whether it's roadside assistance and other things, that are just meant to help a Demo connected driver get the most out of their car and save the most money.

We're continuing to refine those value props, and we really see ourselves as sort of like the Nest or smart home car Larry, but for smart cars, where we're creating this ecosystem of hardware and compatibility and a developer ecosystem where these things become mutually beneficial.

And the developers continue to add value to the user experience.

The users continue to fund the developers by buying their apps and their services, and eventually we can grow the Demo network.

So we're very much focused on that consumer growth and kind of sharing the Demo message, helping more people get connected.

And eventually we do want to see the really, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we have a couple of my co-founders came out of the autonomous vehicle space.

We have some pretty big ideas about how the infrastructure, that protocol side that I mentioned that we're building can be leveraged in the autonomous vehicle world in V to X applications where you're talking about, say, connecting cars to the grid or other types of physical infrastructure.

And for us, it's about proving out both of those things.

One, that people want a great connected car experience that the OEMs have failed to deliver.

And two, that developers want a great platform to build on and that an open source ecosystem is going to be more valuable than 30 closed ecosystems that all the automakers are building.

You have so much opportunity out there because when you think about what a car is and what a car is becoming, you know, it's a mobile power station, it's a mobile data center, the opportunity that this could bring is just limitless.

So if a consumer wanted to get this, where do they go? A couple of places they can go.

Demo.zone, we have a .zone website.

We think that's pretty fun.

That's cool.

Demo.zone is our homepage.

You can learn a bunch about demo there.

And at that page, you'll find out information about the mobile app, about this protocol and the developer platform.

That's kind of really the one stop shop.

If you're interested in checking out the connectivity and the hardware specifically, shop.demo.zone.

Or you could actually just find demo mobile in either of the app stores.

Again, if you have a Tesla or a relatively modern car, I'd say pretty safe bet if your car is two to three years old or younger, you could probably download demo mobile and get connected.

Although I mentioned some of the copy outs earlier.

If you are either a car manufacturer or somebody on that front or even a developer, what's the best way to get engaged with you? Partners@demo.zone is an email that I check daily for those kinds of conversations.

There's also, of course, information on our website.

But partners@demo.zone is whether it's a developer, auto manufacturer, or some other sort of auto services company.

There's obviously many, many, many of them out there.

We'd love to hear from you.

Well, hopefully they all get plugged in because it'd be really nice to have a standardized platform that works effectively.

Imagine a world where any car could really talk to the other car and you could have an application.

And if you are one of those people that even just has two different cars at home, a Ford and a Tesla or a Toyota and a Nissan, imagine one app where you could have them both in the same place.

Yeah, well, you got to have the guy.

Imagine a world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We need to get somebody like Will Arnett on the pod here.

Will Arnett.

Give him a pack of smokes and let him read that copy.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, awesome, man.

Alex, it's been just a pleasure talking to you.

It's exciting stuff that you're working on.

I can't wait.

I downloaded it on my phone.

I got to, of course, you know, connecting to the VW back end is a little... A little trickier than I'd like, but... VW is one of the tricky ones.

It's not a fault of your app.

It's a fault of... Yeah, yeah.

You don't run the apps.

You don't run the... You know, it's another, like, another interesting thing is that we hope that to see more of the automakers open up some of those APIs.

But getting into the fun open source car hacking world, there's people who've reverse engineered those APIs.

And it becomes to get a little bit interesting once you peel apart some of the layers.

Yeah, I'm not ready to jailbreak my car, but if it gets bad enough long enough, I will.

Yeah, yeah.

There'll be some of that in the not too distant future.

Yeah.

Well, Alex, thanks so much for being on.

Really appreciate it.

Excited to see where you go with this.

Can't wait to see, you know, all the possibilities that this will bring.

Chris, I really appreciate the conversation.

It's been great.

And yeah, thank you for having us on and hope you keep track of Demo.

Thanks for watching.

I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

And please give us a like.

And if you haven't already, subscribe.

And I will see you in the next one.

(Session concluded at 4pm)