The Need for Speed

The automotive industry is feeling its greatest jolt of change since the advent of the internal combustion engine. Our research shows that organisations across sectors are struggling to turn their digital vision into reality, and this problem is particularly pronounced in the automotive industry. Automotive companies lag behind on all key dimensions of digital transformation—just 30% of automotive organisations surveyed believed they had the required digital capabilities compared with 35% of organisations globally.

The new report by the Capgemini Research Institute The need for speed: four recommendations to turbo-charge digital performance in the automotive industry’ highlights the following priorities that will be critical for automotive organisations to journey from digital laggard to master:

Leverage digital technologies to enable self-service and improve the retail experience. Just 28% of automotive companies use digital technologies with customers to enable self-service compared with 64% of digital masters.
Develop a digital culture that spans traditional automotive silos and hierarchy. Six out of ten automotive respondents say that culture is their main hurdle to digital transformation.
Create a centre of excellence to set direction, coordinate digital products and services and share learnings. Only 28% of automotive organisations have a digital unit in a marked contrast to 67% of digital masters.
Build an open innovation platform for digital services. This is critical to automotive companies if they are to protect against digital natives entering their space.

Given the sheer scale and pace of change in the industry, automotive companies need to shift up a gear to not get left behind by more digitally agile new entrants. Download the report.