Tomorrow, you may buy a Porsche because obsessive German software experts promise the car's data can't be hacked by spies.
The company’s IT chief, Lutz Meschke, sees data security and data protection as a competitive advantage for German automakers in the medium term. Germans are more focussed than just about any other nation on preventing Big Brother surveillance.
Porsche can ensure that control over data remains with customers, who themselves decide how their data should be used; this, as Meschke notes, could become an important selling point.
In sales departments, everything revolves around digitalisation too, but that means Porsche does want some way of peeking over your shoulder as you drive.
"We must not only get to know the customer," says Meschke, "Porsche also needs to have access to customer data ourselves, in order to develop business models of the future."
In the medium term, Porsche is looking to generate a double-digit percentage of its overall business through digital services. The sports-car manufacturer is thus looking to invest heavily in development, explained Meschke, Porsche’s deputy chairman, at the company’s digital lab in Berlin.
The facility aims to soak up ideas from other tech companies in the city, where many of Germany's start-ups and digital research units are concentrated.
Autonomous driving in particular is set to dramatically alter the efficiency of vehicle use and, as Meschke notes, "we should therefore start from the premise that we need to create significant growth potential beyond the vehicle itself, at the latest by the arrival of the autonomous driving era."
The automotive industry is undergoing a major upheaval, and should thus remain open to cross-pollination of concepts and ideas from other industry sectors.
"If we do not want automotive manufacturers to be reduced to pure hardware suppliers," says Meschke, "we have to demonstrate our digital competence now."
As an example, Meschke recently announced the production of an extra-fast charging station for electric sports cars such as Mission E, which should hit markets by the end of the decade.
The Berlin lab will also create solutions for the digital transformation of the parent company, the Volkswagen Group.
"We have to become a bit of an Internet company," says Meschke. The automotive industry will change more in the coming five years than in the past 50, but one thing remains clear: "You will definitely want to drive a Porsche yourself in the future - just not in a traffic jam."
