5 important facts you should know about the connected car

If you love cars, if you consider investing your money in a new car or  you are just casually skimming the web for news in the moment’s automobile industry trends, there is something that should be of high interest to you: the connected car.

The connected car

As you probably know, this is not just a car. It is equipped with internet access and with a wireless local area network. If you are wondering what this means, what makes this car so special and what are the benefits of the technologies and services behind it, here are:

5 key facts you should know

1) A car that stays connected. According to ConnectedCarsWorld, the connected car technology mostly uses satellite navigation, which is based on the global-positioning system (GPS) and a database of roads. Apart from this, however, many consumers now use smartphones to add internet connectivity to their cars. Internet connectivity allows for more elaborate forms of navigation. It is now possible to gather and aggregate information from a large number of vehicles. Openstreetmap is a project of creating an open-source map by collecting GPS data from users while they’re on the road, and Trapster is a great, constantly updated, database for the locations of police speed traps.

2) The eCall system. Starting from 2015 all new cars in Europe are to be equipped with a network-connected tracking device and in the case of an unfortunate accident, this device will automatically alert the emergency services. This is known as the eCall system and the EU states that this technology will save up to 2500 lives a year.

3) The apps. Thanks to our great and vast apps industry, the types of apps on offer are rich. Francesca Foriesta, director of the GSMA’s Automotive division states: “The range of connected car services is constantly expanding and only our imagination today limits the possibilities.”.

There are 3 categories of such services:

– Infotainment: cloud based in-vehicle services and news are widely known;

– Navigation: services which are used for parking, journey times, travel and traffic assistance;

– Telematics: services which offer breakdown help and stolen vehicle tracking.

4) The embedded approach. It is used by many connected car companies nowadays, such as Toyota, Scarlet Motors and Peugeot. This approach is based on a two-party communication: an operator and a car company. Embedded telematics provides telecom operators with a broad opportunity to provide more advanced V2V( that is, Vehicle-to-Vehicle) support to automobile manufacturers. Ford, however, has chosen a different approach.  The company opted for a ‘bring-your-own’ approach and it allowed clients to use their own smartphone, iPad or MP3 player for its Sync service.

5) The self-driving car. Nothing feels as smooth as a self-driving car, and this seems to be the ultimate goal that many companies, out of which Google takes the lead, seek to achieve. Although this desired fully-perfected version of the connected car is years away, Google is taking large steps in the right direction, by performing experiments with human observers inside vehicles and developing huge maps data projects (Google Maps).

These are the 5 most important facts about the new connected car trend you should know.

If you have any more questions, feel free to add a comment.

Philipp Kandal