Balancing lifestyle enhancements with privacy concerns as cars drive into cloud-based computing
Seattle, WA – You’ve driven your fancy new Mercedes to an unfamiliar city a few hours away for a business meeting, and a friend asks to meet you last-minute for lunch. You don’t have the first idea which blocks are safer than others or which parking lots are the most secure.
Today, your choices would be to take your chances or skip lunch. But what if one day, not so far in the future, your car could find the statistically safest nearby parking spots for you?
This idea is already a functional proof-of-concept, created and developed by staff at the Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America office in Seattle – all in roughly two days.
MBRDNA’s Seattle office, one of seven based across the United States and 25 around the world, is entirely focused on cloud computing and finding ways to implement it in automotive applications that improve the driving and ownership experience.
The office started with one employee when it opened in May 2017: Mike Dosenbach, site lead and senior engineering manager, whose résumé includes software development experience at Amazon and a senior engineering role with cloud-computing start-up Okta. MBRDNA Seattle has since expanded to 70 employees – a diverse group from 10 countries and five continents, a quarter of whom are female – and plans to hire another 80 over the next 12 months.
Their mission is to develop the next generation of Mercedes-Benz back-end and convert internet-connected aspects of the brand’s cars to cloud-based computing, which takes the data transfer and processing load outside of the car and puts it into an environment with much more substantial computational resources.
“The computations are done outside the car with no perceptible delay to the driver,” Dosenbach explained at a recent media event at MBRDNA Seattle.
Seattle is “cloud mecca,” according to Dosenbach, and Mercedes-Benz is the first automaker to open a software development office in the city, giving the company direct access to the local talent pool and closer relationships with Seattle-based large-scale cloud computing providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
“There’s a lot of functionality built natively into these cloud providers that allows us to develop our software faster,” Dosenbach said.
They also incorporate a volume and flexibility of technology that would be difficult for even a large company like Mercedes-Benz to set up and operate on its own.
“Cloud technologies are easier to scale,” Dosenbach said. “We can bring up and down servers either quickly or automatically as traffic to services increases or decreases.”
As soon as the topic of cloud computing comes up, critics immediately raise two concerns.
First, what does having all of this information flying around mean for a driver’s privacy? Consent is key, according to Markus Ehmann, Senior Technical Product Owner at MBRDNA Seattle.
“We give the customer the choice of which services he wants to use, and we just send out the data that is absolutely necessary for these specific services,” Ehmann said. “We need to have the location of your car to show you the traffic around your location. The moment you decide you don’t want to use the service anymore, we won’t sent out the position of the car anymore.”
“We’re building a global solution here, so we’re going for the tightest constraints that we can at this point in time and we’re following German data protection laws,” Dosenbach added. Germany’s laws around consumer privacy are among the strictest in the world. “Over time, we may expand that so that we have certain pieces of functionality here in the US, especially for the new A-Class where it’s aimed at a younger audience. They’re a little bit more generous with their data, and maybe we can do more for them. But right now, we don’t have any specific plans to do that.”
And then there are concerns about hacking, that opening a car up to external connectivity might make it vulnerable to any number of security compromises.
“By using the big cloud providers, that gives us a level of protection,” Dosenbach said. “If there’s any ability to hack into AWS (Amazon’s cloud computing service) or Azure (Microsoft), it’s going to be front page news on the Wall Street Journal.
“At Amazon, where I used to work, they have teams of security experts working on this day after day after day, and they’re doing everything they can to stay ahead because it’s critical to their business to have that security in place.”
Above all, the purpose of undertaking the effort and expense of this shift is to improve the vehicle ownership experience.
“It’s really a lifestyle proposition,” Dosenbach said. “It’s giving the customer what they want, even if we haven’t thought about it. If we have the tools and the features there that will give them what they want when they want it – and maybe sometimes before they realize they want it – then that’s what we’re trying to do in the long term.”
Keyword: Mercedes Heads Into the Cloud with R&D in Seattle