Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
Having now experienced an in-vehicle demo with Here, I can understand why they feel they have something different to say. This is a company you’ve probably experienced without even realizing that you did.
Here powers the navigation maps for BMW, Toyota, Garmin and Yahoo; to name a few. They create indoor and outdoor maps, voice navigation maps and public transit and traffic maps, and they’ve been doing it for over 20 years. In 2013, over 10 million of the new cars sold in Europe and North America had this system. In total this equates to four out of five vehicles with factory-fit navigation systems having Here in place. As I said, a company you’ve likely experienced but maybe didn’t know you did.
I’ve been talking with Here, specifically the automotive team, about its vision for the connected car. That vision is the cloud. By connecting your vehicle to the cloud along with your personal smart devices, your vehicle basically becomes another smart device – although quite a large one – that you can interact with given your personal preferences to customize the experience. Recently I attended a conference where an OEM compared the transition from the first mobile phones where nothing changed until you bought a new phone to that of today’s smartphones where you can continue to add new features and customize your experience. Today you buy a car and nothing changes until you buy a new one. By connecting your car to the cloud, small steps toward a “smartphone-like” car experience start to become real.
First we got ready for our drive around Berlin with a smartphone. What did we want to go shopping for today and which store would we go to? We looked at some reviews before making a decision. OK, once the decision was made we saved it to the cloud. And just like that, it was in the car too. The personalized start screen came up letting us decide what favorites we wanted to include. Don’t like Starbucks? Pick another brand and those will be the coffee locations suggested along your route. Same thing with petrol, do you use a certain brand or have loyalty cards? Just let the system know and those locations will be prioritized for you. You can also determine at what level you want to be notified for refueling suggestions. Any device connected to the car can have a personalized profile. These are just a couple of examples of what you can do.
Now we’re off on our drive. As we move along, the perspective of the map automatically changes based on our speed. The faster we go the higher the view of the route – the helicopter view – and the slower we go the more granular our view. No need to make these adjustments yourself by taking your hands off the wheel. If you’re meeting friends at your destination you might want to write them the details of the location and time of your arrival. You can do this through text message or e-mail via your contact list. The integration of this function was calculated to provide a 70% reduction in driver distraction. In the future it will be voice activated and you can also set intervals to send updates to your friends if you’re going to be delayed by say 10 minutes or more. If you want to see your route on the instrument cluster, you can move the content easily between the two screens. Note that the individual OEM ultimately determines if these features are included in their vehicles, but Here makes them available.
Big data was also a topic of the day. By providing cloud functionality on the edge of the mobile network the latency is reduced, allowing for response times that could support vehicle-to-vehicle notifications, say for an icy road ahead. If the cloud in the core of the network is used, the latency would likely not meet the criteria for these types of applications. Here is working with Nokia Networks and OEMs to further refine the solution. Over-the-air map updates also will be available which allow you to select which maps you want to update in your navigation system so that the geographic regions you never go to aren’t part of the update.
Personalizing your parking experience is another category in the works. Today you can get parking recommendations near your destination based on the size of your vehicle and other criteria you might set. But in the future you will be able to reserve, check the pricing and pay for your parking through the system. Your parking location is synced to your smart device through the cloud when you shut down the navigation system, ensuring you never forget where you parked. I can definitely think of a few of my friends who need this product. If you need to walk farther to your final destination, the walking directions are also transferred to your smart device along with a picture of the location you are looking for so you know what to expect.
There can be multiple profiles for all drivers of the vehicle. Examples of how the vehicle could identify who is driving are the key fob, seat settings or smart device Bluetooth. This would be up to the OEM to determine.
And then I got to play backseat driver. Don’t say it, I know what you’re thinking, “all women like to play backseat driver.” But seriously, there is a backseat screen similar to the one in the center console that allows some rear-seat functions. You can search along the route, browse different settings of the route and change the view you want to see, but best of all you can add destinations. This is where the backseat driving comes in. If there’s a stop to be added to the route, the individual in the back can add it to the route and it is automatically sent to the driver’s screen. This is a key safety feature to allow the driver to keep their hands on the wheel if changes need to be made while in motion. In the future this will also be possible from any connected smart device in the vehicle.
This was a very enlightening trip around Berlin and I expect we’ll continue to innovate our connected car experiences through Here in the future.
