VP says company remains “bullish”on in-car Wi-Fi, sees need for both embedded, bring-your-own-device solutions
Mercedes-Benz has been in the news in the past month for offering connected car service as standard for five years on all new vehicles, one of the longest multi-year offers yet. But it isn’t just big news for Mercedes; it’s also a testament to Verizon’s continued investment in connected car technology.
Verizon is one of the longest tenured telematics providers in the U.S. market and has worked with Mercedes-Benz since 2009, said Mike Peterson, vice president and general manager of OEM business for Verizon Telematics, in an exclusive interview with GPS World.
“Mbrace has the widest breadth of services, including remote connection for door lock/unlock, remote vehicle start, a feature that consumers have been asking for for a long time as evidenced by after-market industry,” Peterson said. “We’re also delivering diagnostics data to dealers and adding the ability to access certain apps on the head unit without the user tethering their phone — that’s the big new thing.”
Verizon is exhibiting mbrace at CTIA Super Mobility 2015 in Las Vegas this week. mbrace services include navigation, location apps, remote safety and security features, and advanced travel assistance.
Embedded connectivity is a more expensive alternative to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model. Despite the embedded vs. BYOD debate in the industry at-large, Peterson doesn’t see one way as better than the other.
“Part of it is always demographics. With Mercedes-Benz customers, while the majority are connected with smartphones, the simplicity of having to use a radio head unit as opposed to their phones will be the right experience to create for premium customers,” Peterson explained. “Other price sensitive brands will continue to see BYOD as the way to go.”
Peterson admits the decision to equip all vehicles with the service is in part designed to prime customers so that the technology becomes a must-have. But, he adds, that the connected car creates a relationship between the manufacturer and consumer that benefits both, particularly with regard to safety.
While Verizon is the telematics provider to six OEMs in the U.S., including Volkswagon and Hyundai, Peterson doesn’t take the credit for decisions like the one Mercedes made when extending mbrace’s reach.
“I would call it a partnership heavily influenced by automakers. At the end of the day, the automaker decides what equipment to put into their vehicles. We provide all service, but they very much protect what goes into their car.”
One feature of mbrace that Peterson calls “a big deal” is the ability to turn your vehicle into a Wi-Fi hotspot. It’s a feature that has gotten caught between customer demands and regulator concerns that those increased demands will lead to spectrum-sharing that hampers the progress of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.
“We are quite bullish on Wi-Fi in the car. You’re already equipping the vehicle with a connected device that’s Wi-Fi capable,” Peterson said. “We’ve done considerable research, and it’s all come back very positive.”
IAV Automotive Engineering test vehicle. Photo: Denso
The autonomous, or driverless, vehicle market seems to be a big side topic at connected car conferences. Location technology will continue to play a role in the development of autonomous vehicle markets. However, many view a fully autonomous vehicle to be more than 10 years away — these are usually folks from the auto industry or academia. Others, those who lurk around Silicon Valley, believe that driverless cars will be on the road in half that time…and once again, if Detroit doesn’t move on it, they will.
Just as GPS was once thought of as science fiction — something that naysayers said would not be fully operational for decades — autonomous vehicles are now thought of as an extension of the connected vehicle market. However, technology and legal issues will make the implementation of an autonomous, or driverless car, a tenuous road in the next few years.
One executive from Verizon Telematics, which is a major player in connected car technology, said it is going to take time, perhaps between the years 2025-2030, to grow the autonomous vehicle market.
“You just can’t flip a switch and have autonomous vehicles [on the road]. You have to take baby steps to develop a network, build an infrastructure and condition the marketplace,” said Kevin Link, Verizon Telematics senior vice president. “The collaboration is going to have to be more than one player, including the government. It was a while before desktop computers evolved into laptops.”
While the technology hurdles will be significant for autonomous vehicles, there are features today that will help shape the market, Link said. “Mercedes cars remind people to steer and turn around corners, when to stop at a safe distance and to change lanes,” he said. “These are not taking you from point A to point B autonomously, but real-time connected car features will feed into the autonomous car.”
The evolution of autonomous vehicles will not be derailed at this point, given the intensive research and investment focus from both the private and public sector, said Tim Johnson, NextEnergy director of transportation initiatives. “However, cars that ‘drive themselves’ will not be in mass production in the next five years. Ten years, maybe. Five, no,” he said. “This is not a technology-limited premise. The technologies are rapidly approaching realistic use in limited applications, but the regulatory, liability and infrastructure aspects are far from being fully implemented in the next five years.”
Technology Hurdles Await Early Autonomous Vehicles — More Regulation than Technology?
Some of the technology hurdles center around the speed, capacity and logic of the vehicle and infrastructure systems to manage the significant amount of information required for self-driving vehicles, Johnson said. “If it was possible to wave a magic wand and have all vehicles made simultaneously capable of these communications and logic decisions, it would be much more viable to create a mass, public environment for self-driving cars,” he said. “In reality, there will be an extensive transition period, possibly 15 to 20 years, where capable vehicles will need to deal with incapable vehicles. Once again, this is not so much a technology issue as it is policy, regulation and liability.”
Autonomous Products Already Out There…
Autonomous vehicles will only continue their current momentum as the technology for assisted driving is already well underway with features like self-parking, lane departure warning, predictive collision warning, back-up collision intervention and blind spot prevention, said Scott Frank, Airbiquity vice president of marketing.
An example is the Infiniti Q50, which uses Airbiquity technology for Infiniti InTouch Apps. “What we’re going to see from here is a shift from driver assistance to zero driver involvement — the ultimate expression of autonomous vehicle — where the car does all the driving and there isn’t even a steering wheel or brake pedal,” Frank said. “We won’t see fully autonomous vehicles becoming commonplace in five years’ time due to the massive amount of technology, infrastructure development and integration that needs to happen to ensure the requisite amount of safety.”
NextEnergy’s Johnson said that cars that drive themselves are already in use in restricted access sites, such as military bases, restricted commercial and university locations, national lab campuses and more. “These are the first real-world applications of both the vehicle and infrastructure technologies to test the practical limits of semi-autonomous driver-still-behind-the-wheel cars,” he said. “Much like the FAA use of limited test sites for the development of regulatory aspects of drone flight, these sites are providing the information and insight to move the potential of cars that drive themselves closer to everyday use.”
A Denso autonomous test vehicle drives the track while a plastic friend looks on. Photo: Denso
Will Public Transit Be the First Proving Ground?
Most companies have different opinions when asked whether the public transit area will be the first major market, and serve as the catalyst, for autonomous vehicle growth. “Although we don’t know for sure, it could be that automated public transit programs, will operate in controlled environments with known routes [meaning low speed operation with pedestrians/bicycles operating on the same thoroughfare, but the automated transit system does not have rails or guide ways — the route planning is easily changeable with no impact to the transportation infrastructure],” said Roger Berg, Denso North American Research and Development office vice president.
Denso believes the autonomous vehicle market will encourage additional functionality within the premium car model lines, but gradually these advanced driver assist systems will become more and more common and eventually spread through even the economy car segment, Berg said. “First systems deploy warnings or simple lateral and longitudinal vehicle control. But then functionality for what most people refer to as ‘driverless cars’ or ‘automated driving’ would only be usable under fairly benign driving and traffic conditions, such as some level of automated highway driving,” he said.
Public transit as an “early adopter” business model is viewed to be less probable in the near term as many of the technical challenges facing autonomous operation require significant research and development and capital investment, said Chris Hennessy, IAV Automotive vice president, engineering. “Most of this capital is centered on markets where the return on the investment can be substantial. At the moment, the most likely scenario for a reasonable ROI is in the premium-brand automotive market, where consumers are willing to pay a premium for new technology,” he said. “This market and the technology growth that will occur from this early-adopter market will provide a foundation for cost-effective proliferation of this technology to other markets, where either the operational boundary conditions are narrower or the available capital is lower, which is typically where public transit would fall. Exceptions to this condition could be analogous to the light-rail market, where the interaction to the general public can be controlled and managed with isolated tracks or lanes of travel, but this would require significant planning and capital investment in infrastructure.”
Airbiquity believes that public transit will not be a first adopter. “No, the first adopters will be private parties in urban areas providing a value proposition to people struggling with congested cities, long commutes, and high parking costs. You’re going to see small and innovative companies offering car services with autonomous vehicles operating on city grids at lower speeds,” Frank said. “They will source the autonomous vehicles from non-traditional automotive makers that move faster than traditional automotive makers. Local government will also be involved, since they own the majority of the infrastructure and need to ensure safety standards are established and met.”
In other location news:
Kore Telematics, fueled by a large investment in it by ABRY Partners, bought RacoWireless in an all-cash deal, according to published reports. The transaction will give the companies a combined 3 million M2M subscribers.
