The networked car: a glimpse into the future
You’ve just dropped your children off to school and it starts to rain. Not a big deal because your windshield wipers automatically kick in. They’re synced to the national weather service and a local relay station has told them exactly how much rain is going to fall in the next 20 minutes so they’re ready to go.
But the rain has been falling hard about 30 kilometres further on the route you normally take to work and two of three lanes on the highway you take have been blocked thanks to an accident.
No worries, other cars along the route you normally take have been feeding your car updates on road conditions and traffic and your GPS has already mapped out an alternate route. As a bonus it’s also found the gas station with the cheapest price on regular fuel along the way and the grocery store next to it has already put the items on the list your partner e-mailed you aside for pick up when you arrive.
Sound a little familiar but at the same time a little Jetson-like? Probably because it is. Today’s vehicles have rain-sensing windshield wipers, GPS units that receive traffic reports and show slow spots on the screen and some vehicles can even be equipped with features that will read text messages and e-mail that are synced via Bluetooth to you.
But what comes next? Most of our lives are networked, from the minute we wake up our cell phone is connecting us to friends and family and our home computer has us logged on to social networking sites. At work we automatically launch our favourite instant messaging program and we’ll update our Twitter account several times throughout the day.
The car is the last bastion of segregation from the network. Strides have been made to keep individuals connected while in the car, but the car itself is still ‘offline.’
Recently, The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) held a workshop in Toronto, bringing together executives from the U.S. and Canadian private sector, public sector, and academia to visualize the innovation of the next generation of cars – “networked” vehicles.
“This forum has triggered the creation of four new expert workshops that are crafting components for the evolution of the networked vehicle,” says Barry Gander, Executive Vice President, CATA. “The workshops will meet in the Spring of 2009 in the U.S. We now have an appropriate outline to formally organize and develop the technologies and business models that will help bring the ‘networked’ vehicle closer to reality.”
The four workshops are: standardization, mobile enhancement, social networks and auto cloud computing. Representatives from IBM, Cisco, Intel and HP, respectively, will lead each group.
Also coming out of the workshop were six specific points that are going to be focused on over the coming years.
