The automotive and technology industries have a long history together. Cars are, after all, one of the 20th century’s most innovative technologies. And the automotive industry has long been a benefactor as well as a beneficiary of the tech industry—the car phone was a predecessor of the now ubiquitous cellphone.
So what’s happening between these two titanic industries today? How do the hi tech and automotive markets work together these days? Here are a few major ways in which cars and space age innovation are working together.
Vehicle to Vehicle Communication
The car industry has been quietly unveiling vehicle to vehicle communication (V2V) over the past few years. V2V is a system in which cars communicate data among one another using a massive cloud-based communication system. While the technology has not yet become commonplace, it stands poised to become as everyday as the cellphone over the next few decades.
V2V presents intriguing new methods for everything from preventing car collisions to improving traffic efficiency to monitoring street use (thereby allowing city planners to better measure success). User-focused V2V could allow motorists to trade playlists and text one another during traffic jams. The tech industry has been talking about The Internet of Things and about Big Data for years now, and the automotive industry is turning those concepts to its advantage.
Self Driving Cars
This is the one we’ve all been waiting for, and there’s little doubt that it’s finally becoming reality: self driving cars are the future. Google and Tesla have gotten the most press, but BMW, Audi, and others have also been hard at work bringing this lofty dream to the streets.
Cars that drive themselves are making inroads beyond just drivers’ realities, too. Even the production of cars is being changed radically by this new path. Ford and other automotive giants are adding armies of coders and other techies to their companies’ payrolls. The industry’s culture is quickly becoming younger, white collar, and hip. Cars expected to do everything from driving to the grocery store to connecting to the internet, leading one Economist article to call them “smartphones on wheels.”
Digital Interfaces
Once cars drive themselves, what are people going to do? When everyone’s a passenger, there will be no need to put your hands all over everything. People will want to relax when driving, to kick back and enjoy the ride.
To capitalize on this, BMW is working on an upgrade to touchscreens called the wavescreen. The wavescreen will allow users to control radios and other internal car features with mere hand movements. Users will no longer have to get their hands all over the insides of cars, making for easy improvements to interior maintenance, a reduced spread of disease, and ease of usability.
Digital interfaces have, historically, not been the automotive industry’s usual field. And this is one way car manufacturers are helping the tech industry: by providing a huge number of jobs to UX experts, coders, API innovators, and other techies looking for a change of pace from the usual Silicon Valley work.
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