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14th Annual Focused Conference & Exhibition

Telematics Detroit 2014 June 4-5, The Suburban Collection Showplace, Novi, MI, USA

This exclusive article has been released in association with Telematics Detroit 2014

Telematics Detroit 2014 is the world's largest and most influential business focused conference and exhibition dedicated to the connected car and the future of mobility

For more info visit the website: telematicsupdate.com/detroit

Connected car, connected home

Eva Munk reports on efforts to bring connected car and connected home closer together.

Does the idea of your car chattering away with home entertainment systems, thermostats and even

delivery services sound like the song of the future?

You’d be surprised how many are already working on it.

As of last September, Denso and Sharp are collaborating on new technologies that improve the comfort,

safety and convenience of vehicles by integrating connected vehicle technologies with home electronics.

Mercedes-Benz is busy at work with Nest Labs to integrate the Nest Learning Thermostat.

Ford has partnered up with Eaton, SunPower, Whirlpool and Georgia Institute of Technology to explore

ways to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions by integrating home appliances with plug-in

electric vehicles.

And last month, at the Mobile World Congress, Volvo demoed a new “Roam Delivery” service that

allows consumers to have their shopping delivered straight to their cars.

“By turning the car into a pickup and drop-off zone through using digital keys, we solved a lot of

problems since it’s now possible to deliver the goods to persons and not to places,” says Klas Bendrik,

CIO at Volvo Car Group.

And that’s just the beginning.

The future of connectivity

“Among other things, these connected cars will be able to act as a personal assistant, helping you plan

your life,” says Michael Curry, vice president of product management for IBM’s Elastic Middleware

Platform. “While you’re sipping your morning coffee in the kitchen, your car will tap into your home

network or Cloud, check your calendar, weather forecasts and traffic updates to figure out the best

route to take to work or to get your chores done — and even tell you what time you should leave.”

But it won’t be easy to bring the car and the home together, says Magnus Lundgren, strategic sales

director – head of Connected Vehicle Cloud at Ericsson. “Finding the best way to connect the two is

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hard,” he says. “The first step is to make them both accessible from the Cloud and then to find new

innovative solutions to bring these two entities together.”

There are basically two options for doing this: connecting the car directly to the home or connecting it

indirectly via the smartphone or another portable device.

Aricent, a San Francisco-based engineering services and software company, has embraced the first

option. Its connected car solution, which is now available on Texas Instruments’ OMAPTM 5 automotive

platform, connects a car network to a home and Cloud network over LTE, allowing a driver to monitor

and control his home remotely.

Apple, among many others, has embraced the second option with its iOS in the Car (newly rechristened

CarPlay).

Obstacles to adoption

So why aren’t we all cooking dinner from our cars yet?

According to Egil Juliussen, principal analyst, infotainment & ADAS, IHS Automotive, it’s the house’s

fault. “Home automation is a slow market,” he says. “Twenty years ago, home automation projects were

controlled by PC, cost $3,000 to $5,000, and nobody could afford [them]. Now that the technology has

[dropped] from thousands to hundreds of dollars, it makes a big difference.”

A dearth of connected home appliances is also a big factor. And so is the lack of crossover between the

car and the home.

“There is a gap between the car and the home, and one of the reasons is that you have industries

moving on very different timelines – industries with not a lot of crossover between players,” Juliussen

says. “I see relatively no crossover into the home. Part of this is the ownership chain. The people who

have relationships with the car are the car manufacturer in the first few years or the leasing company.

They’re not the same people that you have your home services from.”

Nick Hunn, a British expert on wireless communications, agrees. “In one way they’re competing, in

another they don’t really appear to understand the existence of each other because they are such a

diverse market,” he says. “It’s a bit like saying your supermarket competes with your doctor. Both have

an interest in you and your health, but there’s no way they’d consider themselves as competing.”

What’s more, there’s a lot of reticence of people to sign up with multiple service providers for different

products, according to Juliussen.







And there is also the issue of privacy. For example, how do you resell a car that knows so much about

you? “How do you disconnect all of your personalized electronics and reset the car for the new owner?”

Hunn asks.

M2M to drive uptake

According to Lundgren, advances in M2M, mobile broadband and Cloud services will propel things

forward, nevertheless.

He estimates that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and these devices will range from

street lights that adjust to road conditions to shipping containers that allow fruit growers to remotely

monitor their cargo and make temperature adjustments.

The connected car will be a big part of the uptake, according to Thomas M. Müller, vice president,

electrical & electronics systems engineering, Volvo Car Corporation, in a presentation at Telematics

Detroit 2013.

“The value of the connected vehicle is limited if you don’t connect it to anything,” he says. “Some of the

connected services will be internal, but the Internet of Things is also quickly becoming a reality, and the

car is a part of that. The speed and ease with which we are able to connect to external providers,

services and partners will be very important going forward. This is one of the reasons why we are

investing in Cloud services.

“Some of the more immediate integrations will be with third-party services such as Internet radio [and]

traffic information. But we also see a range of other interesting opportunities. For instance, usage-based

insurance, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and mobility solutions. … For any of these solutions to

work, it’s imperative that we can connect to external partners and providers quickly and at low cost.”

Eva Munk is a regular contributor to TU.


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