How the Luxury Car Industry Utilizes Document Databases

The need to store and manage data is at the forefront of operations across all industries. The luxury car industry is investing heavily in data management, with a paper on ‘Luxury Car Data Analysis’ outlining how this data is vital for the orchestration of advanced analytical techniques, including data mining, machine learning, and data visualization. 

The data collected from luxury cars includes user behavior, vehicle data, environmental data, and data monetization and is taken from vehicle sensors. The report shows that the typical number of sensors found in a vehicle ranges from 60 to 100. However, with further advancements in vehicle technology, the sensor count could potentially increase to as high as 200 per vehicle. In order to store and use this data, luxury car companies are investing in data management systems that are flexible enough to process this information. One such database is the document database. 

What is a Document Database?

A document database is a type of NoSQL database that, instead of storing data in fixed rows and columns, stores data on flexible documents. An article on ‘What is a Document Database?’ lists the three advantages of this database: it is an intuitive data model that is fast and easy for developers to work with, it has a flexible schema that allows for the data model to evolve as the application changes, and it can horizontally scale out. The flexible schema allows the database to collect both structured and unstructured data, which means that it can store a wide range of information related to the customers and their luxury cars. As more data becomes available, luxury car companies are investing in modern data management systems to remain agile, keep up-to-date with evolving trends, and improve their services. 

Document Databases in the Luxury Car Industry 

BMW - Personalized Car Data

Luxury car customers expect their vehicles to do more than just take them from A to B. Modern luxury cars need to be able to store and use customer data to improve their services. BMW is known as an everyday supercar and is famous for providing advanced engineering and performance mixed with a price point that doesn’t reach the stratosphere. The car company also provides advanced personalized services through its database. BMW’s CarData is a type of document database that uses keys to store different data points. This includes vehicle-based data, usage-based data, event data, and data for electric vehicles. BMW customers who pay for this data are able to access this database and work with the car company to create a personalized service as well as get insurance premiums tailored to them. 

Porsche - Digital Twins

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a car that can be used to collect data in order to predict events within the product lifecycle and recommend appropriate actions. Instead of using real vehicles for tests, car companies can create digital vehicles, allowing the systems to test various scenarios. A feature on Medium titled ‘A Porsche Digital Twin: Driven by Data Streaming & NoSQL’ explains how a NoSQL database is the foundation of this innovation because of the complicated schema changes. A document database is able to seamlessly adapt to schema changes because not all documents in a collection need to be the same field. This allows a document to hold multiple bits of information in one document. In this case, each part of the digital twin would have its own document where every data point related to the physical car could be stored. Porsche is famous for its automotive engineering, and it is adapting to the new types of data that can be acquired, which has allowed it to remain one of the top luxury car companies.

Audi - IoT Technology 

One of the key use cases for document databases is its ability to power and store data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Audi is one of the most sought-after luxury cars and is a favorite among those who use luxury rental services. What makes Audi so popular is its Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2X) technology, which allows vehicle-to-vehicle communication and allows cars to integrate with smart cities. It can also be used to determine when traffic lights will change at an intersection. Compared to traditional databases, document databases are able to store unstructured data (data without a fixed schema) from IoT devices and collate them to allow for real-time analytics. This allows Audi to provide an IoT service that will give them a better understanding of traffic flow and conditions, allowing them to plot their routes more easily.

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By ML staff. Images courtesy of Pexels.