There’s more to success than beingan ace diagnosing thorny prob-lems others can’t resolve. You canbuild your reputation (and busi-ness for your shop) at parties, sit-ting around the bar with friends

while waiting for pizza to arrive or watching yourkid’s little league game with other parents. Themore you know and share about cars and drivingthat is forward-looking, the more people willthink you’re on top of everything, including yourmastery of automotive electronics. You just needenough ammunition to sound dangerous.

Here are some thoughts gleaned from theauto shows and new-car introductions fromthe first part of 2015, including the most in-triguing “auto show” of all these days, theConsumer Electronics Show.

When Americans think about the technolo-gy and electronics they want in a connectedcar, it’s for things more reasonable and every-day-useful than what ivory tower futurists en-vision. For connected cars, this is what driverswant most:

On-demand, real-time traffic informa-tion. Drivers want to know the fastest way toget to work (or back home) based on current

traffic conditions or,with a couple ofcranky kids in back, tothe campground orthe beach. Accurateinformation is onlygoing to come frommillions of cars andtrucks anonymouslyreporting their loca-tion and speed all thetime, sent from on-board telematicsmodems or, better,from cellphones (be-cause there are manymore phones). Tidbit:Researchers at Berke-

ley say such data can be truly anonymous.Automated map updates. The most com-

mon navigation map found in a five-year-oldcar is the one it was sold with. Drivers don’twant to pay $150 to $250 for a new map discwhen they can buy a whole new Garmin orTomTom system for the same money. They al-so don’t like the minor hassle of going to thedealer and ordering a new map set. If a vehi-cle has an on-board telematics modem, newdata can be downloaded over the air—majormap updates at night, temporary road closingsright now.

There are some concerns about the securityof data sent over the air, as well as batterydrain if data is sent at night while the vehicleis parked. Tidbit: Map updates cost more for avehicle than for a dashboard GPS because it’stied to the initial cost of the device. There’smore data in a car map than in a Garmin PNDmap, but not enough to explain $200 vs. freeupdates for life.

Real-time weather and news informa-tion. Same deal as traffic information. Driverswant news-you-can-use information right now.Is the road iced over 10 miles ahead? If a cus-tomer is two hours from the beach, is it stillgoing to be sunny or is that 30% chance ofrain now 60%? He could get the informationby listening to weather on the radio, but driv-ers today want the information now, not at 10and 40 minutes after the hour.

News means the same thing: Flash theTigers’ score on the center-stack LCD aftereach inning, or if a plane went down outsideDenver. Tidbit: Safety enthusiasts, includingsome in government, say zero informationpresented is safest. Realists say small doseswon’t hurt the driver, and putting it on the ve-hicle’s display is far safer than having the driv-er fumbling for news updates on his smart-phone while driving.

Real-time parking spot finder. Citiesgrow larger without expanding parking pro-portionally. An increasing fraction of gasoline

BillHoward

Your customers already know you’re an ace in the shop. You can

enhance that reputation (and add new customers) by sharing your

knowledge of vehicle trends during activities outside the shop.

bhoward@motor.com

Eye On Electronics

Drivers’ most-desired features in a connected carare more mainstream than futurists and au-tomakers envision, says Gartner automotive ana-lyst Thilo Koslowski. In ascending order of im-portance, their most-desired features are: on-de-mand, real-time traffic info; automatic map up-dates; and real-time weather and news.

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14 May 2015

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16 May 2015

burned in big cities comes from driv-ers circling in hopes of finding park-ing. Parking lots and garages couldreport to the cloud—the amorphousconcept for online that used to becalled cyberspace—how many spacesare available. At some point, a cus-tomer’s vehicle could negotiate on hisbehalf, reserve the nearest spot, and

the automaker and the app providerwould each get a small cut on thedeal. Tidbit: Eventually, a garage willmonitor each parking space with sen-sors or cameras for an exact countand location of available parking.Self-parking cars could navigate to anavailable space, while the owner wasfreed to attend to other matters.

Eye On Electronics

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Driving assessment and coach-ing. Say what? This means twothings—monitoring a person’s drivingfor a drop-off in alertness severalhours into a trip, or after even lesstime if he’s had a long day or shortnight. At the very least, everyone be-lieves drowsy driver detection is agood idea for the other driver, who’san idiot.It also means the insurance compa-

ny plug-ins that determine a cus-tomer’s insurance rate based on hisdriving habits. For the riskiest driv-ers, an OBD II plug-in connectormay be the only way he or she can getany insurance. The Progressive Insur-ance Snapshot program monitors adriver for six months only, but that, ofcourse, could change. Tidbit: In thelab, driver assessment prototypes in-cluded sophisticated eye tracking. Itturns out that measurement of steer-ing wheel movement works well onits own. Cars with lane departurewarning add that to the overall assess-ment.This information comes from a

2014 study by Gartner, a global techconsultancy. According to ThiloKoslowski, head of Gartner’s automo-tive practice, driver interest falls offfor technologies where the automak-er assumes the vehicle, not a smart-phone or tablet, is the center of a dri-ver’s connected universe. They’re un-moved that auto company execs des-perately want to “monetize” the con-nection. Speaking at the ConsumerTelematics Show, Koslowski men-tioned three connected car featuresthat hold the least promise (in theeyes of car owners):

Application downloads directlyto the vehicle. For most general-purpose apps, a driver would ratherhave it on his or her phone than em-bedded in the car. An exceptionmight be for a music app such asPandora, if there’s no extra cost and asecond subscription is not needed.

In-vehicle media purchases.You’ve heard Taylor Swift sing “BlankSpace” a thousand times. Only noware you moved to action because ofthe convenience of tapping the BuyNow button on the center stack LCD

EYE ON ELECTRONICS MAY 2015_Layout 1 4/17/15 12:38 PM Page 2

Circle #11

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button, with the automaker getting asliver of the purchase price. That’sthe theory. Drivers don’t see theneed.

In-vehicle social networkingupdates. Cross the Golden GateBridge or pull into the Six Flags park-ing lot and you’re dying to Tweet orFacebook what you’re doing andwhere you are, via an in-car applica-tion? That, too, leaves motorists cold.Especially if the end of the Tweetreads, “… sent via OnStar 4G in my2015 Buick Regal.”What we’ll see by 2020, perhaps as

early as 2017, is self-driving vehicleswith an asterisk. They’ll be in a dedi-cated lane of the highway, perhapsthe HOV lane that has been repur-posed several times already to boostthe sales of hybrids and now EVswith just one occupant. This first-genself-driving car will stay in lane, keeppace with the car in front, react tocars cutting just in front of it and

smoothly hand off driving to an actualdriver if its processors overload.It will use improved versions of to-

day’s lane keep assist, adaptive cruisecontrol and blind spot detection. Itwill need smaller, cheaper 360° laserscanners—“cheaper” meaning belowthe price of a barebones Nissan Versarather than a fully optioned CadillacEscalade.Self-driving vehicles have climbed

Pikes Peak. They have navigated ur-ban areas with hands-off Google en-gineers behind the wheel. In Januaryof this year, journalists self-drove anAudi 550 miles from Silicon Valley toLas Vegas for CES, with another as-terisk: Humans drove the A7 throughthe centers of towns.The no-restrictions self-driving ve-

hicle is yet to come. That will be onethat goes from point A to point Bwithout needing a licensed driver. Itwill require a cheap laser vision sys-tem to create a 3-D map around it,

more processing power and a way totalk to traffic lights and other vehiclesthrough dedicated short-range com-munications (DSRC) system. It willalso require wrangling over liabilitylaws. The time frame? Perhaps within15 years. It means a 90-year-old cou-ple, no longer licensed, could get tothe doctor on their own. Or a 10-year-old daughter won’t need Momor Dad to drive her to school. Ofcourse, she could always walk.

Bill Howard writes at the busy intersec-tion of cars and technology. He is a con-tributing editor of Ziff-Davis’ Extreme-Tech.com and PCMag.com, vice presi-dent of the International Motor PressAssociation, former editor of PC Maga-zine and six-time winner of ComputerPress Association awards for writing.He has written for The Wall StreetJournal special sections, Popular Sci-ence, Bimmer and BMWCCARoundel.

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