The Connected Vehicle Evolution From An IoT Perspective: Interview With Manuele Cavalli, Co-Founder Of TEXA

Connected vehicles represent the fastest-growing field in the bulking Italian IoT landscape. We are now witnessing the company TEXA, who settled down in the vibrant North-eastern Italian entrepreneurial tissue and emerged as a prominent global player in the Smart Car segment, becoming an undisputed leader in automotive electronic technologies.

According to Manuele Cavalli, Business Development Director and Co-Founder of TEXA, at the beginning of its successful entrepreneurial journey the company was able to ride a unique revolution, when circulating vehicles started to abandon the concept of mechanical technology, thus shifting towards electronics. While these significant changes started transforming the entire automotive sector, TEXA quickly scaled up, becoming a frontrunner in the all-in development of diagnostic tools, exhaust gas analyzers, air conditioning recharge stations and devices for vehicles, with particular emphasis on cars.

Seizing Challenges & Riding Changes In A Vastly Competitive Market

All in all, the ’90ies saw the consolidation of a major digital revolution, which brought to the consequent actualization of the Internet of Things. In this context, TEXA emerged in a period when the concept of startup was not familiar in the Italian mechanic and electronic Technologies market yet, and when sources of local or national support could not recognize adequate strategies to target newly established companies. Manuele Cavalli acknowledged that the most fruitful development approach at the origin of TEXA’s success was indeed to seize the existing market changes and to reinterpret them to the best.

This allowed the company established in 1992 to emerge as one of the trailblazing precursors in the shift from mechanic to electronic innovation and smart living.

Focus On Education & Training: TEXA Academy

Manuele Cavalli explained that new professional needs, combined with the desire to counter the spreading phenomenon of youth unemployment, led TEXA to envision a training school for the automotive sector dedicated to state and private technical institutes. As a matter of fact, a specific focus on services and training has always defined TEXA’s philosophy for growth and sustainability. Therefore, to stay in line with the hurtling developments in the fast IoT market, this moved the company to develop the Academy project, in order to spread its training model characterized by an integration of practical and theoretical activities. This was needed to become increasingly representative in the mechatronic sector, training technicians who could possess a preparation on electronic diagnosis and the use of the instruments required by today’s automotive market.

Thanks to its 20 years of experience in the automotive sector’s smart appliances, the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research consequently decided in 2004 to sign a Memorandum of Understanding and to validate the very proactive role of TEXA in providing specific education through its network of training centers. The first kind of training, targeting technical and vocational institutes and allowing students to engage into a specialization path consisting on the adaptation of the company’s solutions to the automotive market. The second one pertaining to the training for distributors, with clients ranging from repair shops to industrial automotive fleets.

Revolution In Vehicle On-Board Diagnostics Devices

It was demonstrated that due to its importance within the Italian IoT arena, technologic innovation is increasingly affecting the smart car segment, especially in terms of communication systems equipping vehicles. In future, the major boost in this field will attain to an increase of over 4.5 million cars connected through Gps/Gprs for vehicle localization and registration of driving parameters with insurance purposes. More and more vehicles will be provided with onboard SIM and already this year, connected vehicles in Italy represent the 20% in total.

In this whirl of innovation, Manuele Cavalli explained that TEXA has recently presented a new patent, launching in the Italian market a pioneering service, which will allow a big part of the Italian cars stock to be connected 24 hours a day. TEXA CARe consists on a miniaturized and patented device installed in the vehicle’s on-board diagnostics socket, which can guarantee the driver’s personal safety by warning an operations center active 24/7 in case of an accident. Additionally, this service will also function as a direct line between the car and the workshop, communicating vehicle faults and malfunctions in real time.

The Commission’s eCall Regulation

This terrific invention from TEXA goes exactly in the same direction of the eCall regulation proposed by the European Commission in June 2013 and voted in favor by the European Parliament on April 28th, 2015, which requires all new cars be equipped with eCall technology by April 2018. In case of crush, eCall automatically dials 112 – Europe’s single emergency number, communicating to the nearest emergency center the vehicle’s exact location, the time of incident and the direction of travel (most important on motorways), even if the driver is unconscious or unable to make a phone call, e.g. due to injuries. Therefore, a ‘Minimum Set of Data’ is sent, which includes the exact location of the crash site. The Commission estimates that, once the system is fully implemented, eCall could save more than hundreds of lives every year and help injured people quicker.

Conclusion

IoT has lingered the idea of connecting and putting online all data thanks to technology. Alongside with the IoT aptitude to generate new living ecosystems, Manuele Cavalli thinks that TEXA’s future strategic intention will be to communicate also with other infrastructures, connecting vehicles devices especially with the Smart Home and with what in Italian pertains to the ‘domotica’ field, the second fastest IoT sector in Italy. Cavalli’s idea of opening to markets bordering with the automotive sector thus set Smart Vehicles as the liaison with other fields connected to the smart living, to better express the diversification in the technologies that TEXA already uses. Addressing young entrepreneurs, startuppers and smart devices’ developers who intend to launch new initiatives in the automotive industry in Veneto Region, Manuele Cavalli assumed that there is plenty of small industrial examples looking for new ideas to reinterpreting old patterns, filling up formative gaps that school sometimes omits. However, passion must remain the key engine for any further initiatives and young entrepreneurs must be able to carefully analyze and seize the existing and upcoming market needs if they intend to succeed in the fastest-growing IoT sector.

 

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