NOVI, Michigan — It turns out that, if the speakers on Telematics Detroit 2014‘s “super panel” have any credibility, Ford’s long-discredited former CEO, Jacques Nasser, might have been right. When he wasn’t busy wasting the company’s money on luxury brands — Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo — and alienating suppliers — the Firestone tire debacle — Mr. Nasser’s cause célèbre was proclaiming the car dead and the Internet ascendant.
The fact that he bet the farm on Yahoo instead of Google and that he was more than a decade early in his prognostications doesn’t change the fact that Don Butler, Ford’s executive director of connected vehicles and services, Phil Abram, GM’s chief infotainment officer, Henry Bzeih, Kia’s Chief Technology Officer, all now say that time is at hand. Indeed, Mr. Butler, of Nasser’s old alma mater, goes even further, stating emphatically that “the [car's] actual driving experience is now just table stakes.” In other words, if the predictions of the Telematics conference in Novi, Michigan, come true, the automobile as we know it is morphing into a mobile communications device that we just happen to ride around in.
Thilo Koslowski, vice-president of automotive ICT for Gartner, goes even further, calling the automobile the largest of wearable mobile devices and predicting that “in 10 to 15 years, the automobile will be the coolest mobile device on the planet because of all the real estate available for connectivity platforms. It’s an ideal platform because we know exactly where [the consumers] are and what they’re doing.”
BMW’s ConnectedDrive system already allows users to browse the Internet on the centre screen.
Russell Purcell, Driving
It all may come as a shock to we boomer-generation gearheads used to horsepower and torque — rather than bits and bytes — as the differentiators between brands and models. But, according to Frank Weith, Volkswagen of America’s general manager of connected services, “Gen Y is 80 million strong in the United States and predicted to outspend the baby boomers as soon as 2017,” and, as we all know, our progeny can’t cross the street without being connected to the World Wide Web. Tom Gebhardt, president and COO of Panasonic Automotive, provides the perfect context for how important connectivity in the automobile will become, noting that while we consume roughly 80 million cars every year, about a billion smartphones and tablets are sold annually. Kevin Link, senior VP of Verizon Telematics, makes an even more emphatic case, noting that while there are about one billion cars currently on our roads, by 2020 we will be using 31 billion connectable devices. Yes, about five for every man, woman and child on the planet.
So the automotive industry is playing catch up. Volkswagen’s new Car-Net system is so important, says Weith, that it rolled out its all-encompassing telematics system — which offers location-based roadside assistance, remote vehicle access and automatic crash notification — across the three largest global markets — North America, Europe and China — simultaneously in the last 12 months. Abrams says The General is being even more aggressive, planning on rolling out more than 30 models with high-speed 4G connectivity over the next 12 months, production beginning as you’re reading this.
The best and worst infotainment systems in the industry
Even the geeks, however, provide cautionary notes. Koslowski notes that as onboard telematics systems morph from proprietary systems through commercial OSs to common commercial platforms with included IP addresses, security becomes ever more problematic. Nor is this likely to become less of a concern as the question of connectivity moves consumers’ auto-related information into the cloud as the data generated by onboard systems becomes ever more all-encompassing.
Indeed, an even greater problem may be just around the corner. According to Link, the Internet of Things is all about connecting devices so they all talk to one another for a seamless transition between tasks. Link uses the example of a connected device in his fridge that tells him how many eggs are left in the side drawer thus determining where he shops on the way home. He also notes that, while most automobiles don’t currently support this kind of interconnectivity, Mercedes-Benz’s Digital Drive Style at least offers an early example of the intersection between Internet and automobile, allowing you to access your Nest home thermostat via an onboard app. The downside, of course, to all this interconnectivity is that it opens up the possibility of even wider spread security breaches.
Speed bumps or no, there appears to be no derailing this march towards onboard connectivity. By 2016, Link says there will be 2.5 wireless connections for every person on earth. By 2022, the average family of four will have access to more than 50 connected devices; the chances that the automobile will not be one of these would seem remote. On a more dramatic note, Abram predicts that driver-operated taxis will be replaced by driver-less cars by 2030. Jim Nardulli, senior VP for NNG, goes even further by proclaiming, “Telematics is dead. Infotainment is dead. Here comes life/car integration.”
For those of us of an older, less wired generation who find all this connectivity too scary to imagine, we can at least take some small solace from one ironic detail from Telamatics 2014. Despite the day and a half preaching the ubiquity of connectivity, the conference’s wi-fi network’s protective password was a closely guarded secret that saw few in the conferences able to access the web. And even those blessed with the proper incantation found their connections dropping with alarming frequency. Maybe we boomers still have a few more years to enjoy our analogue world.
Ford’s Sync touchscreen infotainment system offers many layers of communication.
Derek McNaughton, Postmedia News
