••• automotive research
Car-owners generally open to sharing data with automakers
More than half of the people surveyed by McKinsey & Co. said they had no problem allowing their car to collect information and send it anonymously to the automaker to help improve the next generation of the vehicle, as reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Bennett.
The number jumped to 76 percent if car companies guaranteed the data would be used only to improve vehi-cles and not be shared with anyone else. Seventy percent said they are already “consciously” sharing their data with smartphone applications, such as mapping directions.
Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed said they would be willing to switch to another manufacturer if it was the only one offering a vehicle with full access to apps and data. Last year the number was 20 percent.
Meanwhile, 61 percent of those surveyed said cars with autonomous functions should be legal. Another 27 percent would agree but only after seeing successful pilot projects.
Along with the consumer survey, 91 executives in automotive and related industries were also questioned. A total of 75 percent of those executives said they had no countermeasure strategy in place in case their vehicles were hacked. A total of 3,184 people from the U.S., Germany and China were interviewed for the McKinsey Connectivity and Autonomous Driving Consumer Survey.
••• consumer psychology
We’re up in the air about Airbnb
Consumers are divided in their opinions of companies that make up the sharing economy in the U.S., according to a recent nationwide survey of U.S. consumers by Radius Global Market Research, New York.
Consumer opinion is evenly split on whether companies in the sharing economy compete fairly with more traditional businesses, such as taxicabs or hotels, as roughly equal numbers of consumers either agree (47 percent) or disagree (53 percent) with that statement.
But consumers also have positive opinions of the current and future roles of these companies in the U.S. economy. Consumers more often agree that these companies provide income sources that are not otherwise available (88 percent), that they make it easier for consumers to get the products and services they want (91 percent) and that they are important to the future success of the economy (78 percent).
Radius GMR’s study shows that participation in the sharing economy is relatively minimal. Fewer than one-in-five consumers have used Uber in the past year. And even fewer consumers reported using services pro-vided by Airbnb (7 percent), TaskRabbit (4 percent), HomeAway (6 percent) or GetAround (3 percent) in that time period.