W3C Automotive Web Payments Task Force

STATUS: This is a draft description of a joint task force of the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group and the Web Commerce Interest Group.

The mission of the Automotive Web Payments Task Force is to support streamlined and secure Web payments from connected vehicles.

Leadership

• Rodrigo Meirelles, WEX
• Ted Guild, W3C
• Ian Jacobs, W3C

Scope

Activities

• Build shared understanding: To start, the task force will build a shared understanding of the connected vehicle ecosystem.
• Describe use cases: The task force will describe use cases for automotive Web payments.
• Do a gap analysis: The task force will study existing and emerging Web standards that might bear on the use cases, then identify and prioritize gaps in Web technology to address the use cases.

Out of scope

• Incubation of technical work: The Web Commerce Interest Group is not chartered to develop specifications. Therefore, any specification work should happen within a different type of W3C group.

Topics

• Pay at the pump / charging station
• Tolls & Road usage
• Parking
• Retail Point of Sale (POS) (such as "drive-thru")
• Driver Distractability
• Automated payments (e.g., delegation of authority to the vehicle to make payments)
• Shared Vehicles
• Connectivity
• Some but not all vehicles will include browser runtimes, so the task force may explore both in-browser and out-of-browser approaches (such as described in the ViWi protocol)

Deliverables

• Prioritized automotive payments use cases
• Web technology gap analysis to satisfy the use cases
• Plan for incubation

Timeline

• By end of August: Prioritization of topics and initial use case descriptions
• By end of September: Detailed prioritized use case descriptions
• By end of October: Initial gap analysis
• TPAC 2017 face-to-face discussion of results
• By early December: Plan for incubation

Participation

Participants from the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group and the Web Commerce Interest Group are invited to join this task force.

Participation from different parts of the ecosystem will be important to ensuring the quality and relevance of the deliverables. This includes participation from:

• Auto manufacturers
• Tier One providers
• Fuel and service companies
• Merchants and merchant associations
• Digital wallet / payment app developers
• Fleet management companies
• Web technology specialists
• Payment solution providers (e.g., POS vendors, shopping cart providers)
• Standards bodies involved in vehicle payments (e.g., IFSF, Conexxus)

Meetings

Initially, the task force should plan to meet every two weeks by phone.

The BG and IG plan to meet during TPAC 2017 but on different days. The task force should therefore endeavor to schedule a face-to-face discussion on the Wednesday of TPAC.

Communication

This group conducts its technical work on the public mailing list at public-automotive-pay@w3.org (archive). See W3C mailing list and archive usage guidelines. There is also a private list restricted to task force participants and W3C Members to be used for administrative purposes at internal-automotive-pay@w3.org (archive).

Information about the group (documents under review, face-to-face meetings, etc.) is available from the task force home page.

Decision Policy

Task force decisions do not in themselves constitute decisions of the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group or Web Commerce Interest Group. Each group follows its own process for recording decisions (e.g., statements of support) for the task force deliverables.

The task force will pursue consensus decisions.

Intellectual Property Considerations

Each participant is subject to the intellectual property commitments made upon joining either the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group or the Web Commerce Interest Group.

Questions? Ted Guild <ted@w3.org> and Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>.