Digitalization and Electrification´s Transformational Impact on the Automotive Mobility Industry - A multiple case study on the Swedish automotive mobility industry facing changing business models, challenges, and future opportunities

Abstract

The automotive mobility industry, including car manufactures, car-sharing, and ride-hailing companies, is experiencing technological change through electrification and digitalization. These two trends can potentially disrupt the whole industry through, i.e., electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, connected vehicles, IoT, big data, and autonomous driving. The industry actors have been affected by these trends to a large extent and will continue to be impacted in the future. This research aims to deepen the understanding of how the industry actors have been affected by these two trends by adopting business model and business model innovation perspectives and to identify challenges and future possibilities arising from these trends. The study is set in a Swedish context where car manufacturers, car-sharing, and ride-hailing providers were interviewed through a qualitative research strategy. The results showed that these two trends impacted all three components of the business model framework (value proposition, value creation and delivery, and value capture). Several challenges related to the two trends were identified, including regulations, competence gaps, IT security, digital environment, charging management, charging infrastructure, few resources, high costs & low supply of EVs, and electricity prices. The future opportunities that were found related to electric multimodal mobility and integrated mobility offering, autonomous vehicles, new customer segments, dynamic pricing, charging possibilities, new collaborations, and facilitated P2P car-sharing. The findings provide a foundation for industry stakeholders to identify areas to improve and evolve strategies around electrification and digitalization and future research areas to address.