This year, Avis Budget Group’s connected fleet will cover about 4 billion road miles. And that fully connected fleet could generate more than 7 billion road miles of data in 2020.

To unlock new avenues for value creation from the data that connected fleet generates, Avis Budget Group on Wednesday announced a partnership with automotive data services platform Otonomo.

With the Otonomo Automotive Data Services Platform, Avis Budget Group says it will gain new and actionable insights from its connected cars.

Those cars, according to Avis Budget, feature a varied range of makes, models and telematics technologies. Avis Budget said it will gain insights to improve operations, lower costs and increase customer satisfaction by “reshaping this disparate connected car data for new users.”

Avis also said the Otonomo Platform brings new opportunities to collaborate with cities and other partners that help its customers and the general public.

Through the partnership with Otonomo, Avis Budget Group can explore more of what it called “data for good” opportunities. Those opportunities could make smart cities smarter, improve road safety and traffic flow, improve parking efficiency, and make driving more enjoyable, Avis Budget said.

The company also said data from the Avis Budget Group fleet could improve smart city applications such as planning, road hazard identification, or advanced traffic management. As time goes by, that could mean emissions reduction, better prediction and prevention of accidents, and simply a better traveler experience.

Avis Budget highlighted J.D. Power as being among the first companies to use Avis Budget Group data. An important application the company is using is captured data from vehicles. That data will complement its consumer research on different makes and models.

“Working with Otonomo and Avis Budget Group will add another dimension of rich data to J.D. Power’s Voice of the Vehicle analyses,” J.D. Power vice president, global automotive Dave Sargent said in a news release.

Sargent added, “The fleet is large, yielding high quality data with excellent national coverage and it is also very diverse, with over 200 makes and models, spanning multiple years in the data set we've evaluated.  We're particularly interested in the signals we get from a fleet that is constantly refreshed with a wide selection of new vehicles.”

News of the partnership is in line with recent comments from Avis Budget Group vice president of product development Jeff Kaelin, who commented in a new Auto Remarketing article about his company’s “journey to a connected fleet.” It’s all about shifting control from the rental company to the consumer, Kaelin said, and the company has worked to provide what he describes as “a mobile experience that allowed customers to control their end-to-end rental experience.”

Regarding the Otonomo news, the company’s chief executive officer and founder Ben Volkow said, “Otonomo is a pioneer in transforming car data into valuable insights, and we’re excited at the opportunity to realize our vision in partnership with Avis Budget Group. The global scale of Avis Budget Group, along with its fleet management expertise, offers many new possibilities to realize value from connected car data from fleet-wide predictive maintenance and streamline rental car returns, to smart city and beyond.”

“Data aggregation and analysis is a force multiplier for the automotive industry,” said Strategy Analytics director, automotive connected mobility Roger Lanctot. “Data enables fleet operators to optimize their service offerings, refine their logistics, increase uptime, and improve the user experience. This is nothing less than a breakthrough in an otherwise mature industry.” 

“By partnering with Otonomo, we can better utilize the data captured by our connected vehicles,” said Avis Budget Group chief innovation officer Arthur Orduna “The Otonomo Platform also allows us to safely and securely engage with new public and commercial partners, and together, make an impact on what the future of mobility looks like for consumers, communities and companies alike.”