IMAGINE taking a drive in your car — except you don’t have to drive it. It’s autonomous and it will take you to exactly where you want to go, using the fastest route possible given the traffic conditions at the time. The car is constantly communicating with nearby cars and even nearby infrastructure so that it can adjust speed and distance to other cars and street objects for optimal safety.
The inside of your car is like your communications, work and entertainment hub all integrated into one place. The ambience inside the cabin — the lighting, the air-conditioning, the music — automatically adjusts to your preferences which the car has learned through artificial intelligence.
You can also do work while in the car — setting up meetings, replying e-mails, sending text messages — all without having to type anything because of the advance voice recognition software.
Sounds like something out of science fiction? Well, it will become a reality sooner than you expect. The first truly con¬nected cars are expected to roll out as early as 2020. It may not have all the things just described above but it would have most of them.
The concept of a connected car has been around a lot longer than most people realise. It can be said that the very first connected car appeared in 1996 when General Motors introduced OnStar, a telematics system that would contact emergency responders in call centres in cases of accidents when an airbags were deployed.
Of course when we think of a connected car today, we’re looking at a whole lot more than just a distress call to emergency responders. Essentially, we’re looking at cars with revolutionary enhancements in the areas of entertainment, safety and convenience.
ENTERTAINMENT
For most consumers, the most exciting aspect of a connected car must be the entertainment element. No longer will you have to rely on an iPod for your music or a DVD for your video. Everything can be streamed. Not only that, whatever apps are available through your smart phone will be available through your car’s dashboard. Although there probably will be some manual buttons, most of the functionalities on the connected dashboard can be activated through voice command.
What’s even more interesting in terms of new opportunities is the ability to order things and services through your dashboard. Currently, once a car company sells you the car, they have made most of the money they can from you. There’s still some residual income to be achieved through car servicing and maintenance but there’s very little else they can do to monetise you. But that all changes with a connected car, as the car company could make all kinds of e-commerce and online services available to you through the dashboard.
Some might argue that having such a functional dashboard might be distracting to the driver, but that’s not a problem if the connected car is a driverless car, which it probably will be. Reading the news, watching some videos or texting someone while the car is moving is not a problem if you’re not doing the driving.
SAFETY
Although safety is not as sexy as entertainment is to the consumer, safety is one of the key benefits of having a connected car. A “smart” car that is able to communicate and exchange data with surrounding cars and street objects will be considerably safer than the “dumb” car that we have today.
If you think cars communicating safety information with other cars sound too space age, think again. It’s just around the corner. Toyota and Lexus have announced that beginning in 2021, cars produced by these companies will have communications systems that make use of the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) radio frequency. The DSRC is a dedicated spectrum that has been set aside for an intelligent transportation system in the US.
DSRC is able to transmit a safety message 10 times per second, facilitating things like left turn gap assist, blind spot do-not-pass warnings, electronic emergency braking, forward collision warnings, red light runner alerts, work zone advance warning and emergency vehicle alert.
A connected car will also have predictive prognostics where car owners receive warnings whenever the starter motor, fuel motor or battery are about to die. Guess what, this feature is already available in some General Motors cars.
CONVENIENCE
A connected car is supposed to be optimised for use in a smart city where many public objects are connected as well. So a connected car driving through a smart city would be constantly exchanging infor¬mation with not just other cars but also to traffic lights, stop signs and various objects on the sidewalk next to the road.
Besides providing more safety, such connectivity is supposed to facilitate convenience as well. One of the features of city life that we all hate is traffic jams. A connected car could theoretically help to reduce congestion as the smart city’s traffic lights system would be able to take in all this data flowing between cars and nearby objects and adjust itself accordingly.
Again, this is not the stuff of science fiction though it might sound like it. The Intelligent Traffic Signal System has been tested in several states in the US already. This system allows vehicles to share real-time location and speed with traffic light, which can then optimise the traffic time.
A car that’s as connected to the cloud as your mobile phone is going to be a reality within a few years. One estimate is that close to 90 per cent of new cars would be connected cars by 2020. And given how important it is to millennials to be always connected, don’t be surprised if car connectivity is a sought-after feature as popular as fuel efficiency or engine capacity.
OON YEOH IS A CONSULTANT WITH EXPERIENCES IN PRINT, ONLINE AND MOBILE MEDIA. REACH HIM AT OONYEOH@ GMAIL.COM