Growing membership
Chris Ballinger was previously CFO
Major OEMs have acknowledged the need to cooperate to
fully benefit from the potential of blockchain
March/April 2020 Traffic Technology International 051
www.TrafficTechnologyToday.com
of Toyota Financial Services and
also worked for the Toyota
Research Institute. After he began
thinking about how to use blockchain
to enable economic transactions in
2015, he soon realised that his peers
were thinking along similar lines.
Representatives of different
companies began meeting informally
in Silicon Valley and each time new
people turned up from start-ups, tech
companies and vehicle manufacturers
until there were 40 members of the
group. In July 2019 MOBI was formed
as a non-profit foundation to develop
an industry standard. Group Renault
and Ford chair the group with support
from other major automakers, as well
as Accenture, AIOI Insurance, DLT
Labs, Hyperledger, Trusted IoT
Alliance, and many others.
“We all agreed it was easy to
put a cog on a blockchain, or ledger,
but hard to create a market. The
essential part in a platform economy
was getting to scale, but it’s superexpensive
to develop a whole ecosystem
from scratch. Even GM or
VW couldn’t do it alone. By working
together, we achieved a minimum
viable community. Everyone has
positioned themselves for a slice
of a very big market.”
the cutting-edge AI problem of the
last couple of decades,” he says.
“The world’s best engineers haven’t
solved it yet.”
Allison Clift-Jennings, the CEO of
Californian automotive blockchain
company Filament says the financial
anxieties of the German car industry
are a sign of the times. Daimler
issued two profit warnings in 2019
with a third coming in
January 2020, when it issued
a statement saying that 2019
earnings before interest and
tax (EBIT) are likely to
slump to €5.6 billion (US$6.2
billion) from €11.1 billion
(US$12.3 billion) in 2018.
“Daimler, like other
manufacturers, is operating
with slim margins and has no room
to breathe,” she says. “These old
industries don’t enjoy the huge profit
margins of a Netflix, or an Amazon.
They are incredibly fear-based, which
is why so many joined the consortium.
They don’t want to be left out.”
For the start-ups like Filament
wanting to work with automakers,
the critical factor is tapping into a
large enough eco-system. Otherwise,
there won’t be anything for their
technology to speak to.
“We need the automakers to
adopt the standard, but also the
infrastructure owners, telecom
companies, and so on,” says
| Vehicle Payments
Ballinger. “When the eco-system
is at the right scale, you can pay
for infrastructure. You can get
the car to order and pay for
coffee at a drive through or
pay the London Congestion
Charge in real time rather
than buying a ticket in
advance, or after you have
driven,” he says.
For traffic managers the
holy grail, he argues, is having
tools to manage their
networks. Ballinger says that in
a world moving away from
petrol taxes, the managers need
to figure out a way to get road
users to pay for the next generation
of road infrastructure. Another
concern is how to deal with
congestion, an intractable problem
without real-time pricing structures.
“The problem of congestion comes
down to the classic old economic
argument known as the ‘Tragedy of
the Commons’,” he says. “When
everyone grazed animals on
England’s commons, there was an
incentive to over-graze and it ruined
the land for everyone. We see the
same economic problem in congested
cities, but if you develop a market
and charge people for things like
congestion in real time you have
much better allocation of resources.
The car’s ability to pay will make it
possible to do micro tolling on any
road, whereas now only a small
section of the network is tolled.”
Changing the world
Clift-Jennings believes that
developing a transactive mobility
environment could be as impactful
for the global economy as
e-commerce has been. In simple
terms, blockchain is a distributed
ledger that records all economic
transactions in a decentralised way
across different locations. If a vehicle
is sending out information about
itself to put into the blockchain
it requires the VID so it can be
recognised as a trusted part of the
blockchain community. Filament’s
enhanced Blocklet Mobility Platform
now includes a ‘trusted vehicle
wallet’, which relies on the VID
to verify its identity.
“The ‘vehicle wallet’ concept is
best understood by comparing it
with a normal wallet, which serves
two purposes – it holds your forms
of ID so you can prove who you are
The car’s ability to pay will make
it possible to do micro tolling
on any road, whereas now only a small
section of the network is tolled
Chris Ballinger, founder, Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative
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