You're driving to work in a congested downtown: a car accident brings traffic to a standstill while idling vehicles send increased emissions into the atmosphere, and when you finally arrive at the office you can’t find a place to park. These problems have plagued people, communities, cities, and governments for decades, and initiatives to help solve them have cost millions of dollars. What if it didn’t have to be like that? That’s what Wejo is doing: transforming the mobility landscape as we know it by using data to create good products that can help solve age-old problems like road safety, congestion, pollution, and parking. Wejo enables nearly real-time data-driven decision-making across industries and provides the answers to tough questions, and even questions no one ever thought to ask.
Now imagine you’re driving to work, and rather than a stressful commute you find that your car is doing all the heavy lifting for you. Not only has it placed and paid for your drive-through breakfast order, it’s also looking for free parking and is routing you on the quickest and safest way to the office. This may sound futuristic, but drivers are already experiencing some of these benefits. Through data points collected from connected vehicles and organized into actionable insights by Wejo, the lives of individual drivers are improved; cities can more effectively update infrastructure, prioritize spending, and install electric vehicle chargers in exactly the right places; and the car manufacturers themselves can use this rich, reliable data to build better vehicles for all.
All this is an example of the power of Wejo’s data: Wejo is turning billions of real-time data points into good products that advance the future of mobility and have extensive positive impacts for society as a whole. Wejo receives an unparalleled 17 billion data points per day, collected in real time from almost 12 million connected vehicles over 76 million daily journeys, which translates into clear coverage of a staggering 95% of American roads. There is immense power in this data, and it’s the reason why Wejo has drawn the self-driving vehicle visionary, Larry Burns, into its ranks as a member of its Board of Directors. “Wejo’s innovative platform and proprietary data sets uniquely position the company to realize the extraordinary potential in connected vehicle data and redefine the future of mobility,” says Burns.
Let’s start with the real muscle behind Wejo: the scale of its real-time data processing. Wejo processes 480,000 data points per second. That’s incredibly difficult to do with such an enormous volume of big, complex data, even with the power of Microsoft Azure and Palantir Foundry—two recent strategic partnerships that Wejo has built. “No one else globally in the mobility space can claim the level of data that’s being processed in real time. Wejo is inventing the data ecosystem for the automotive industry for the next 10 years, 20 years, and beyond,” says Richard Barlow, Founder and CEO of Wejo. "With this huge volume of data we're now showing all of these amazing outcomes that support safer roads, less congestion, and lower emissions.”
It makes sense that Barlow would end up at the helm of a company leading the charge in the mobility space. He has been passionate about cars since he was 9 years old when he meticulously built a model of an iconic sports car. Through his interest in motor sports, Barlow was drawn into the behind the scenes telemetry, and these days is captivated by both the demonstrated potential and the future promise of connected vehicle data. "Even a one decimal point difference between winning and losing in motor racing can be fractions of a second," says Barlow. "If you look at our data now, we can machine learn the lanes of the highways, which is impossible to do without connected vehicle data. The accuracy of data has really fascinated me."
Barlow founded Wejo in 2014, and a few years later attracted the attention of car manufacturers like General Motors. These car manufacturers were (and are) interested in what this connected data can do, like help them make electric vehicle batteries more efficient. Wejo can do a myriad of things, like provide a comprehensive picture of what's going on on our roads, right down to a specific intersection. We know that Wejo can make the lives of individual consumers easier, but the power of Wejo is in just how many different sectors their data can make an impact on, from logistics and mapping to safety and sustainability.
Let’s start with logistics and mapping. There have been stories of delivery trucks trying to drive down non-existent roads due to mapping issues, but using Wejo's real-time data, a Wejo customer has been able to identify many new routes. It’s not just delivery routes either, Wejo supports better routing because its data helps identify new roads and routes. Harnessing data from live vehicles enables accuracy and decreases waste and road usage. Wejo can recognize transportation patterns and Wejo data can be used to help mitigate congestion, and re-route drivers in response to real-time road conditions and incidents. With Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation, Wejo has helped reduce collisions through redesigning road networks and close to real-time decisions on work zone safety signage and travel time predictions. These solutions have led to an astronomical gain in productivity as Wejo transformed the power of data—analysis that previously would have taken two to three years can be done in 45 minutes with Wejo data.
Wejo recently partnered with Microsoft and took advantage of its cloud infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, to manage data in a secure and trusted environment. Microsoft is also a Wejo customer: Microsoft is integrating Wejo data into its mapping platform, Bing, and is already identifying new routes. Mapping is an inherently difficult task because roads are changing all the time. “If you don't have a real-time data set or a very fresh data set informing the mapping company of a change of road configuration then your map becomes irrelevant very quickly," says Barlow.
In addition to Microsoft, Wejo works with Hella, a components manufacturer, on a product for predictive maintenance. Imagine if your car could predict when a part may be prone to failure and prevent that from happening by giving alerts—that’s what Hella is building. The work Wejo and Hella are doing is a powerful example of Wejo’s cloud credentials. Also built on Microsoft Azure, Hella and other manufacturers will be able to visualize, analyze and activate the power of their massive data sets within Wejo’s cloud environment. Wejo wants to develop a robust data ecosystem, and their partnership with Palantir—which has spent 15 years on data-driven R&D, customer service, and other critical workflows to build their Foundry platform—allows Wejo to capitalize on that deep knowledge and speed up the process.
Wejo’s data is not just about convenience either, it’s about safety. An average of 123 workers die every year at road construction sites, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Wejo can help make these sites safer by helping cars avoid the areas altogether, improving signage, and better educating drivers. "This can fundamentally save lives. Part of our mantra when we say we have 'data for good' products is we keep asking ourselves, are we doing good for the driver, the community, and the industry around collecting all this data?" says Barlow. Wejo is very conscious about the power of the data it’s entrusted with, and the company prides itself on protecting data privacy and security while also ensuring that the data is always being used for good.
Wejo has barely scratched the surface. While their successes are robust, and they’re already helping multiple departments of transportation, government offices, and various cities to become smart cities, they’re just getting started.
By 2030, there will be 600 million connected cars in the world. With embedded connectivity, the future of data in this space is limitless and Wejo is in a key position to lead the charge of powering a better, safer, and more sustainable future for drivers, manufacturers, and society as a whole.
"In everything we're doing we think about, can we reduce the congestion in cities? Can we reduce emissions? Can we accelerate the adoption of electric cars?" Barlow says. "Everything we want to do is about making people's lives easier, so they can enjoy the experience of driving an automobile or owning one, or being driven in an autonomous one, and actually just getting on with their lives."
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Wejo.
