Cars in competition to become ‘mobile phones on wheels’
The car of the future will let you pay for petrol or parking directly from your vehicle and receive traffic alerts and restaurant recommendations from your onboard digital assistant.
Connected cars – or “mobile phones on wheels” – will be able to do those things and more, including communicate with each other on the road and with the infrastructure around them through their computer networks.
And they will, of course, be able to drive themselves.
Prototypes, fitted with the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications network, turned heads at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain.
But as the excitement and novelty over connected cars grows, vehicle, tech and telecom firms are struggling with how to handle the inevitable legal and ethical issues.
Add to that the risk of cyber attack and reliability issues surrounding a fast and stable Internet connection and connected cars face many obstacles before they can ever be set loose.
To mitigate the risks, telecom and vehicle firms have teamed up to enhance collaboration.
Renault-Nissan partnered with Microsoft in September 2016, and its cars plan to use Microsoft Cortana as a digital assistant.
Three years ago, Volkswagen acquired Blackberry’s European research and development center, a group of 200 engineers, to update its connected software.
The success of connected vehicles will also hinge on the ability of an Internet network to enable lightning-quick downloads or support splitsecond activities, such as the automatic traffic movement of driverless cars.
The current fourth-generation standard enables fast broadband access via mobile smart phones, but government and manufacturers see the next generation enabling con- nection speeds of up to 1,000 times faster than current ones.
The new generation of mobile networks is expected to enable communications between cars and infrastructure, automated manoeuvres such as overtaking and braking, and emergency warning and call systems, among others.