What will the car look like tomorrow?

On the 5th^th Element had announced that the car of the future would fly through the air. If today's vehicles don't fly, technologies are increasingly developing towards a connected and, by 2025, fully autonomous car.

 

In 2017, the connected car market is expected to reach $52.5 billion - and is expected to triple by 2022. Between the Google Car and Tesla, which are making headlines, and Renault-Nissan, which is developing services related to intelligent vehicles with Microsoft, 2017 will be marked by the "connected car".

 

The intervention of these new technologies in the automotive market is not new. Historically, PSA already used connectivity on its vehicles for emergency calls, and Renault has marketed more than a million connected models. In the event of an accident, this enables the airbag to be triggered and the vehicle's GPS coordinates to be transmitted to an emergency centre. The latter then contacts the driver and sends the emergency services if necessary.

 

Connectivity is one of the main drivers of the technological race that is shaking up the automotive industry. Today, this is reflected in the development of the V2V (vehicle to vehicle): the IoT, which connects the vehicle to its environment via a network that facilitates car-to-car interaction. In the event of a pile-up, the car of tomorrow will therefore be able to send a signal in real time to other vehicles in order to warn them ... and ultimately enable them to avoid further accidents. Because, if the car of 2017 is connected, the car of 2025 will be completely autonomous.

94 % of road accidents are due to human error. While vehicle range addresses this problem, one of the main challenges for car manufacturers is that of cyber safety. By 2022, security applications are expected to make up the bulk of the $58 billion connected mobility market.

Manufacturers are focusing on increasingly sophisticated driver assistance features in their current vehicles rather than rushing out of a stand-alone vehicle. While Elon Musk firmly believes that without failure, there is no innovation, full vehicle autonomy is a delicate technological construction where safety assurance is required. Indeed, every Tesla accident is highly publicised and, in Germany, one of them led to the opening of an investigation into the dangerousness of the Tesla Autopilot following an accident that caused the death of a pedestrian. If the automatic car must protect its passenger but avoid a pedestrian, who should it choose? Autonomy then requires, if not free will, then a degree of artificial intelligence that is not sufficiently mature today.

After decades when innovation in automotive processes was synonymous with ever more efficient robots, today, technological progress rhymes with information technology. The entire automotive industry is being rethought: the rapid development of new technologies is transforming the sector. It's called "Industry 4.0": technological breakthroughs are changing the way we make our cars and operate our factories.

 

Nowadays, we no longer talk about manufacturers but assemblers: we coordinate more than we design. New players, such as equipment manufacturers and IT companies are now imagining the car of tomorrow. Thus, the deployment of an OS capable of governing a car will be one of the technological advances to come. If Google is working in this direction, Android is still far from being able to achieve a connected and autonomous car in real time.

 

Today, the IoT makes it possible to rethink the entire automotive industry, from vehicle design to production, to create the connected and autonomous car. A reshaping of this economy that promises great innovations to come as early as 2017.

 

Olivier Duquenoy, Responsible for technical offers & IoT of IT link