Cars may soon get to know your emotions too

A mix of biometry and artificial intelligence aids can make interaction personal

unlikely to go to such extreme lengths to steal a car.

“It all depends on the level of accuracy you need,” said Yoni Heilbronn, chief marketing officer of Argus Cyber Security. “Retina scans are even better than facial recognition” as a potential solution, he said, “but by adding another level of authentication you lose some of the convenience.”

Adaptation

On the other hand, high-tech personalisation could be used not only to create amenities for single owners, but also to instantly adapt a vehicle to suit a variety of drivers. Valets, for example, could be automatically prevented from accessing personal information in a navigation system or driving faster than, say, 30 miles per hour.

In a ride-sharing situation, such systems could also be used to quickly tailor a car’s interior to the physical characteristics of different drivers and passengers.

Rental cars would be easier to operate and safer, Bolton of Continental said. “If I know where your head is and where your eyes are,” he said, “I can adjust the position of the steering wheel and the mirrors so you don’t have to fumble looking for the right buttons.”

Even air bags could be fine-tuned, reducing the intensity of their deployment depending on the size and position of a driver or young passenger.

Some elements of the personalised driving experience are already coming to cars. By the end of the year, Ford plans to add Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant to some of its cars, said Dave Hatton, manager of Ford’s mobile applications for connected vehicles. It will not only allow personalised music stations to play with a voice command, but also enable drivers to juggle chores like adding items to an existing grocery list with just a few words.

Such convenience may come with some trade-offs on privacy.

“It’s a huge concern,” said John Simpson, privacy project director at Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit advocacy group. “All that data is in some database without your consent or knowledge about how it’s going to be used,” he said, adding that there was little if any current government regulation to curtail such use.

Using traffic-tracking programmes like Waze, some consumers have already signalled their preference for convenience in return for giving up some information like their location. Programmers also point out that such services are optional: You don’t have to let the company track you — but then you may get stuck in traffic for 45 minutes.

Today, basic biometric technologies like facial recognition software are used for everything from signing into Windows laptops to thwarting toilet paper thieves in Beijing. Fingerprint readers are commonly used to unlock smartphones.

As consumers become more accustomed to such systems, the introduction of the technology in vehicles may seem like a natural evolution rather than a creepy intrusion.

And it could be fun. Consider the entertainment and social media repercussions in the vein of James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” segments. A builtin camera could record and broadcast your singalong on Facebook or Twitter — assuming the car was in autonomous driving mode.

Of course, drivers could grab quick selfies on the road, too.

“It’s a novel ideal,” Bolton said, “but remember that an infrared camera makes your face look a little like a skeleton, so it’s not that flattering.”