What happens when the large automotive companies, who are all flirting with mobility divisions, measure their success the way they have always measured success? They get crushed.
Instead, consider a day a few years out, and the CEO of Moia, Nissan, Waymo, Ford Smart Mobility, Uber or <insert name of new multinational mobility company> arrives at her desk at 6AM and looks upon her management dashboard. What are the key metrics that allow a mobility CEO to operate effectively?
While it’s difficult to see that future with perfect vision, I can assure you it will be an entirely new set of metrics than for today’s automaker. Today’s automotive CEO is primarily concerned with sales, manufacturing and quality data. In the best instances, these are trailing indicators on a 24-hour basis. If that leader sees something that requires an immediate course correction, there are inherent delays between headquarters and real change.
Tomorrow’s mobility leader might consider some of the following, in addition to the core SaaS metrics:
Revenue per mile (similar to today’s sales data)
- A mobility company’s ability to generate revenue is triggered from the ride itself, the services sold in and around that ride and the data from said ride.
Disengagements (similar to today’s quality data)
- Autonomous vehicle ‘disengagements’ show failures in autonomous systems and are a measure of quality
Uptime yield (similar to today’s manufacturing data)
- Of the possible non-fueling and non-maintenance hours in a day, how much is our service utilized across the fleet? As a related thought: how are we minimizing downtime to increase our total yield (by reducing fueling times, anticipating service issues before they happen, etc)?
Active credit cards (similar to today’s sales data)
- You don’t have a recurring revenue business without active credit card numbers. It follows that you won’t have a mobility business without installs with active credit card numbers (by this measure VW’s recent purchase of PayByPhone is clear headed).
A theme that emerges across these metrics is the notion of an ‘active manager.’ These mobility businesses look like a blend of today’s business with a heavy dose of a SaaS business. How will tomorrow’s mobility CEO act to use this data in the moment as opposed to thinking of this as a series of trailing reports?
Thanks to Stefan Heck, Paul Lienert, Rick Wagoner and Jamie Silver for their ideas when I was putting this together.
