EMEA: How many ways can you connect a car?

As new markets emerge, new market participants also emerge. On the one hand it’s a good thing because a lot of players are coming on board to help solve the challenges at hand. On the flip side there can also be confusion and a lack of integration until things become over saturated, consolidation occurs and the key stakeholders emerge. This holds true for software/hardware vendors, operators and standards focused organizations.
There are two such organizations in play currently in the connected car space that I believe could do some work to clarify how they are working together or not.
The first such organization is the Connected Car Consortium. The CCC was founded in 2011, and their stated mission is to develop global standards for phone-centric car connectivity solutions. They appear to be off to a good start garnering industry participation with 70% of the worldwide market shareholders in vehicles and 60% of the worldwide market shareholders in smartphones being members of their organization. A sampling of these participants can been seen in their charter member list. From the automotive side there is General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, PSA Peugot Citroën, Toyota and Volkswagen. From the consumer electronics side: Alpine, LG, HTC, Panasonic and Samsung. 80% of the world’s automakers already belong and you might notice that Apple currently does not.
MirrorLink is the first effort out of the CCC. This is a technology designed for controlling the smartphone via the steering wheel or dashboard buttons/screens. The technology leverages a vehicle’s controls/displays in order to allow the driver to stay safe by focusing on driving. This is accomplished via connectivity between your smartphone and your car’s infotainment system and a developer kit to ensure that only applications that are safe to be accessed while in motion are launched.
You might be wondering how this plays alongside efforts such as Ford’s Sync and BMW’s ConnectedDrive. MirrorLink is an underlying technology standard that can work in conjunction with or in addition to these aforementioned services. BMW is a member of the organization, although not a charter member.
Today, there are already over 800 devices certified for use with MirrorLink and apps that consumers can download to their smartphones to take advantage of these solutions. An example in the Google Play store can be seen here.
I’ve met with the CCC and seen a MirrorLink demo at two different trade shows this year. They are very open and welcoming about discussing where they are heading with their work and want to get more people involved. More information can be found at the CCC website.
A second organization to mention is the Car 2 Car Communication Consortium, also referring to themselves as CCC. They are focused exclusively on Europe and their stated goal is to develop the following:
An open European standard for Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS)
–An associated validation process focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle systems.
–Realistic deployment strategies and business models to speed up market penetration.
–A road map for deployment of C-ITS for V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure.
There is a section on their website that presents use cases for the challenges they are addressing. This warrants a review to understand the key topics at hand. In fact, Volvo this week announced a warning system designed to protect drivers from dangerous left turns based on knowing there are cars in the vicinity that could pose a safety threat.
This is all great, but they are missing an opportunity to educate the market on what they are doing, the importance of this topic and the road map to live solutions. It would also be good to understand if there are any plans for linkage with the infotainment connectivity organizations? How many different networks can you have in one car before there’s an interference issue? RCR Wireless News attempted to have these discussions with this group, but the response was that we’d have to join to learn more, and it wasn’t an inexpensive membership. So maybe there’s an opportunity now to hear more from them?
Granted, this is a different type of connectivity. With the first discussion the focus is on infotainment solutions and here the focus is on cars and infrastructure sharing information about safety hazards and infrastructure performance. They are obviously two different topics, but as wireless standards evolve I would predict this all could come together in a single network or cloud-based solution, so wouldn’t it be great if there was some interaction between these efforts from the start.