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.
So much has happened in the connected car this year it would be impossible to summarize in one short article, so I’ll touch on some highlights and show the progression toward 2015, and have a little fun with a few surprise entries.
According to Wikipedia, “A connected car is a car that is equipped with Internet access, and usually also with a wireless local area network. This allows the car to share Internet access to other devices both inside and outside the vehicle.” I’d say this definition really falls short of all the things a connected car really is. So what else is in a connected car?
1. WLAN in the car: In May, Audi announced the first car with a factory-installed wireless LAN, the A8. The solution is based on UMTS, can support up to eight devices and offers WPA2 encryption for security. Speeds are up to 7.2 megabits per second; not great, but not too bad for a car.
2. LTE in the car: The honors go to Audi once again, but this time for the A3 model. Due to launch in April, it will cost $100 for 5 GB of bandwidth spread over six months cumulatively, or $500 for 30 GB over 30 months. The Audi Connect service runs on the AT&T Mobility network.
Now that we’ve checked the connectivity box, let’s consider some of the other important aspects of the connected car.
3. Vehicle-to-vehicle safety applications: In March, Volvo announced a pilot project with the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens Vegvesen) to measure friction information from individual cars, share it within a cloud-based system and use real-time data about hazards such as slippery patches on the road to warn vehicles nearby. In addition, it contributes to making winter road maintenance more efficient.
4. Active parking: Mercedes Active Parking Assist searches the road for suitable parking spots and then self parks the car in the space once the driver has approved the car to do so.
5. Piloted driving: Going another step from active parking, there’s piloted driving. Back to Audi again, only now the A7, which is testing piloted driving in Florida, focusing on a congestion pilot that accelerates, brakes and steers based on interaction with the vehicles around it when moving less than 37 mph or 60 km/h. Once the traffic congestion ends, the driver must take back control or the vehicle stops.
6. Autonomous driving is all about the Google car. The company has released a new photo of its driving car/pod, which has headlights but no steering wheel or brake/gas pedals. Although many OEMs such as Audi, Mercedes, General Motors and Nissan have announced autonomous driving efforts, they are moving down a gradual path with the existing form factor of today’s vehicle. Google, on the other hand, is going straight for the end game.
7. OK, not a car, but how about the connected bike? Vanhawks’ connected bike links to an app that can track a bike’s performance, and navigate to a destination through directional signals on the handlebars. If the bike gets stolen, there is a beacon that can be tracked through a mesh network from all the other Vanhawks’ bikes. Lastly, it also has haptic feedback for blind spots and will start vibrating if there is a car you should be aware of.
8. Of course, there has to be a cool sports car in the article: super car, connected car, car in the cloud. The Koenigsegg One:1 is cloud-connected by Telenor Connexion. And the car can be controlled by an iPhone to change the suspension and wing. That’s a lot of money being controlled by an iPhone app, $2.85 million to be exact!
9. Not exactly a connected car, but how about a flying car? Offered in the spirit that I believe the only limitation to everything a connected car can do is innovation and imagination. Who would have thought a car would fly in 2014? Well, here it is.
Rather than an item 10, I will end on the note that we should not sell the connected-car description short, since there are so many important and exciting developments. Increased sophistication in telematics to track driving behavior, vehicle performance, stolen vehicles, misused vehicles and young drivers. Then we have data privacy solutions along with the car network and systems’ security being worked. Then there’s the fun – infotainment – whether from your smartphone or your car. Let’s not limit the connected-car definition to just a smartphone on wheels. It’s about the safety, efficiency and entertainment all in one package. Ok, a very smart package on four wheels.
