Gadgetory

cars are taking their place in the internet of things and jumping straight to 4G to do it think of it as the car having a guardian angel driving with you very responsive touchscreens rich graphics you can watch your Netflix movies in the back you're drawing upon things in the cloud it happens very quickly now you may have noticed that cars have been connected for a while but typically today it's through a kludgy tether to a smartphone and even then running on the older 3G network the big trend that I'm talking about is integrating that wireless connectivity right into the car no phone involved and doing it on the much more capable 4G network technology you have screens in the car that really need to catch up to what the consumer expects from their phone and tablet today things like Google Maps in the car even Google Earth with satellite imagery really enhancing that driving experience it also gives that persistent connection to the vehicles so they can always be online and always have availability to connect to services whether you're doing searches whether you're trying to get real-time data for traffic or for parking I think we'll start to see taking place from the car as well before you see things like fully autonomous Drive these things really can't happen without a real robust connectivity now 4G in cars nails three things from a technology point of view the first is persistence you get in the car you turn on the key and that connections there every time tethered data phone connections tend to be more tenuous not every driver has a smart phone that every driver pairs them not every driver has the apps that connect with the head unit it's a kludgy mess the built-in 4G and built-in apps in the dash are a much cleaner robust solution the next step is speed 4G and cars should be transformative ly faster than the 3G in most phones still and not just evolutionarily so it's a real deal changer and this is also going to be a sort of a late mover leg up for cars because they're going straight to 4G for the most part as opposed to darling with built-in 3G and finally there's integration a built in for gee connection can tap into more of the cars actual sensors and systems than a tethered phone is allowed to that means things like vehicle location vehicle health status of various systems all that can be brought into the connected car experience which your phone just can't deal with now the fruits of these technology integrations are many my favorite is cloud based navigation among the features here are being able to have photorealistic maps that arrive quickly being able to look at a street view image and pan through it smoothly and being able to do rapid cloud based search for what you're looking for as opposed to old tired address and Pio I based search next up is streaming media with that constant always their connection consumer and driver habits will change and start to count on streaming medium or almost as reliably as radio or CD usage and this also means 4G can give us reliable video streaming to the second row no more of those few DVDs your kids are sick of then there's integrated calling right now most of us pair our phone and that's how we get our calling done and that works well but going forward with the integrated 4G the car will be one of the first platforms to have what's called HD voice that means you will get much higher fidelity in your calls which helps in that noisy environment and something called duplex calling where when you talk at the same time with someone else you won't step on each other it'll be more like a landline where you can talk at the same time that's a nice innovation in car hotspots now these have been around for a while but with 4G they'll finally be able to credibly support several devices connected all at one time through the cars hotspot in the past that was basically a pipe dream I'm still not so sold on this as I think car makers want to push to the world of you using the in-dash services which have much more rich data for them than just providing a dumb pipe for you to connect your iPad from the backseat finally there are over-the-air updates a constant 4G connection will encourage car makers to start doing these like you get on your smartphone or tablet once or twice a year look at what Tesla's done with these sorts of things they've rolled out new updates over-the-air that have changed infotainment services that have allowed the sunroof to operate differently they even added a new drive feature the creep function when you lift off the brake like most automatic transmissions they added that to the car with a software update over-the-air with integrated Wireless now where does it stand in the real okay the 2015 Audi a3 sedan is generally credited as being the first mainstream car in showrooms that offers built-in 4G and at a low-end model notice not a high-end move to Chevrolet next which is about to put 4G availability in most of its 2015 cars from large to small that will go along with Siri eyes free for example to start to move things toward a much more smartphone like cabin and then in a few years most GM brands will have 4G available across most of their models IHS automotive currently forecasts a rather modest 1.2 million cars with built-in 4G on the road globally by the end of 2015 but look at just two years later in 2017 that's 16 million cars analysis Mason projects half of all cars on the road will have built-in connectivity by 2024 and nearly 90 percent of new cars selling by that year will have it as well now the biggest hurdle I hear from consumers is often privacy and data harvesting tracking they often say this should map very much to the way other devices have been used as data probes in our lives and let's face it our phones are doing that already but monitor carefully what's happening with a different set of regulations here because automakers are more highly regulated than most mobile device manufacturers secondly there's an additional data plan right now it's 15 to 20 bucks a month give or take after an initial trial period for you to have this 4G lit up in an Audi or a General Motors car other car makers may change that a bit but that's kind of where we are right now in the future I think that will trend towards zero the data there is so valuable to the car maker and they want to get a major uptake of this technology that it would make sense to knock down any cost hurdles additionally they are more than likely to sell or share the data from your car in the aggregate with third-party partners to again rub down the price for them so they can get it to you for nothing but consumers don't want another wireless account and fee that much is clear so there could also be a bundling strategy because many of the major carriers are also the ones who are sort of silently powering this connectivity in vehicles