purple motes

While making cars is a dying industry in the U.S., collecting car maintenance data seems to be a quite promising business. Jiffy Lube has 2,200 North American service centers servicing about 27.5 million customers per year. Jiffy Lube does "fast lube," i.e. quick oil changes for drive-in customers. But Jiffy Lube is also in the data business:

Jiffy Lube® also uses state-of-the-art computing technology to educate customers about vehicle maintenance services, share customers' maintenance histories across its network, and provide services that satisfy vehicle manufacturers' warranty requirements. This gives drivers the freedom to visit any Jiffy Lube® service center with the peace of mind that their records can travel with them. [from Jiffy Lube's History & Mission]

"Educate customers about vehicle maintenance services" means sell services in addition to oil changes based on collected data about a car's maintenance history. Those service are offered at a time when it's highly convenient for the customer to buy the services. The customer's car is right there at Jiffy Lube, ready to be served. That's a propitious action circumstance for personalized, relevant advertising, much like that of text ads displayed in the context of web search.

The automobile industry could do much more to develop its data businesses. Cars generate a large amount of performance data that could be downloaded at maintenance stops. Establishing open standards for such data and making it easy for car owners to grant anyone access to their car's data could enable considerable value in data services. Car service centers could sell a wider range of more accurately targeted maintenance services. Gas stations might sell personalized mixes of gas optimized for the car's driving pattern along with reports on fuel mileage history. Certification and evaluation services in the used car market would be more valuable with much additional car usage data beyond car mileage. Storing, sharing, and processing data is cheap and continually getting cheaper. Businesses that aren't thinking about how to create data businesses aren't learning from Google.

Note: Trust is important for creating value from data. "Don't be evil" makes particularly good business sense for data businesses.

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