BMW, Ford, GM: World's Largest Automakers Form Blockchain Coalition

The work will kick off with in-person member meetings to form project teams for areas such as vehicle identity and data tracking; ride sharing; mobility ecosystem commerce; and data markets for autonomous and human driving.

All told, the MOBI consortium is perhaps the auto industry's first coordinated response to the realization that data produced around cars is a valuable resource and that blockchain could help the automotive industry itself keep control of and manage this data.

Stepping back, the fact that data lacks good property rights means it ends up in data silos of big tech companies which become quasi-monopolies and then just get bigger and bigger - what MIT's Michael J. Casey refers to as "The Original Sin of the internet."

While the car is the next data battlefield that Apple, Google and Amazon are fighting over tooth-and-nail, MOBI sees blockchains offering a powerful tool for decentralization.

"The car is the fourth screen and the next big data battleground. It's a trillion-dollar prize."

One is the data generated inside the car: the average commuter spends a couple of hours a day in their car, and increasingly they're using the internet during that time - for instance, asking virtual assistants for directions.

That's the data generated by the car itself via the multitude of sensors positioned within and around it.

"With these kinds of rich sensors, the cars will be producing massive amounts of data that probably not even 5G networks can handle," Ballinger said.

While the likes of Google and Tesla are way ahead in terms of collecting self-driving car data, Ballinger believes it's still going to take a half a trillion miles to develop cars that are really safe and can handle all the real-world driving situations, such as driving through cities in bumper-to-bumper traffic or navigating the highway in torrential downpours.

While at Toyota, Ballinger took part in a proof-of-concept involving startup BigChainDB which used a blockchain to create property rights for data so it could be shared among car makers, which could then use it to train machine-learning algorithms.