The car as an ambient sensing platform

In recent years, cars have evolved from purely mechanical to veritable cyber-physical systems that generate large amounts of real-time data. This data is instrumental to the proper working of the vehicle itself, but makes them amenable to a multitude of other uses. For instance, GPS information has recently been used for a large number of mobility studies in the academic community [1]-[5], as well as to feed traffic apps such as Google TrafficTM and WazeTM. This use of vehicle data is already having a profound impact in science, industry, economy, and society at large. Now, imagine than instead of accessing one single source of vehicle-generated data (GPS), one can access the entire wealth of data exchanged on the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus in near real-time - amounting to over 4,000 signals sampled at high frequency, corresponding to a few Gigabytes of data per hour. What would be the implications, opportunities, and challenges sparked by this transition?