Amazon’s A-game
The auto world is the recipient of loads of attention from Amazon at CES 2020
CONNECTED CARS ARE ALL THE rage these days. And when CES rolled up, we all expected a slew of announcements from auto majors about connected technology. Honestly, these announcements have become the norm rather than the exception. This year however, big tech showed up with its very own set of announcements signalling their intent to herald the next frontier of connected tech. Among them, Amazon clearly stole the show in Las Vegas with a huge section dedicated to connected car technology.
Amazon's interest in this space isn't unknown. In fact, the company has been making quite the splash with investments across a multitude of auto companies.
At CES, Amazon made quite a few announcements starting with its push to bring Fire TV media streaming devices to cars for the very first time. Amazon, aims to capitalise on chauffeur driven folk and is partnering with BMW and FCA to bring screens and content to cars. In that vein, the Echo Auto, a `4999 device that connects to the Alexa smartphone app and plays through car speakers has already been released in India and is expected to bring numerous car owners into the fold who don't have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay support built into their cars
– a significant percentage of car buyers in India. Amazon is clearly targeting the in-car phone projection duopoly that Apple and Google have enjoyed over the past few years.
Later this year, drivers will be also be able to pay for fuel at more than 11,500 fuel stations with just an Amazon Alexa voice command.
These nifty features and the Echo Auto are expected to be integrated into new generation cars. Kickstarting that is the Amazon-backed Rivian which will have Amazon Alexa support out of the box for the R1 S and the R1 T. The digital assistant will also be built into the fleet of 100,000 electric delivery vans Rivian is making for Amazon.
AWS is a behemoth in technology, so much so that quite a few of the biggest tech companies in the world are hosted on AWS and rely on it to be online. AWS has now partnered with ZeroLight, a company that creates visualisation platforms for car sales and marketing. ZeroLight's technology uses AWS services to generate real-time renderings of car configurations, enabling consumers to spin the car around, look inside and spec it as they please, all virtually. Those renderings can then be used to generate personalised display ads that are shown to consumers on the internet with the configuration that they just created.
Amazon also presented its vision of what future mobility solutions might be like. A future mobility demo used the Alexa Auto SDK and AWS Machine Learning to create an in-vehicle assistant. Driver profiles stored in the cloud are loaded into the system using Amazon Rekognition's facial recognition. Machine learning is used to find patterns, like visiting the same restaurant every day.
At CES, cloud-computing giant Amazon Web Services teamed up with BlackBerry. Unknown to many, the beleaguered company owns QNX, an operating system that's been used in cars for decades. The two companies have collaborated to unveil a new service that helps automakers update security and software features, monitor vehicle health on the go, access data from a variety of car sensors, build new applications and apply artificial intelligence models to all that gathered data.
All in all, Amazon's recent moves in the automotive world serve as a pointer to how important the auto industry is for big tech.