13 January 2015 Last updated at 00:16 GMT
Detroit Motor
Show: Car firms take on the tech giants
Journalists
crowd round the new Ford GT at the Detroit Motor Show - but is the technology
inside as much of a draw?
Detroit in January is largely filled with just one group of
people, petrol heads.
They come to the Detroit Motor Show in droves, eager to get a
peek at the latest offerings from the big three US car makers and the European
manufacturers who are competing for market share in the lucrative car market.
But car firms here, while continuing to focus on horsepower, are
beginning to turn their attention to processing power.
That's because most analysts agree that if car makers want to
appeal to a younger generation, who are driving approximately 23% less than they used to, they'll need to shrink
cars into, well, iPhones.
"If you look at the buying decisions of the younger
generation, they're a little worried about the navigation system that gets you
from point A to point B, but mainly they're interested in texting and being
able to communicate with their friends," says Gary Silberg, the national
automotive sector leader at consultancy KPMG.
Samira Hussain speaks to the head
of Mercedes-Benz, Dieter Zetsche "Whoever gets that right, that's who will win in the
marketplace."Dieter Zetsche, the boss of Mercedes, put it more
bluntly."The car of the future [is] a smartphone on wheels," he told
the BBC.
The
Mercedes F 015 drives itself, and can be reconfigured inside for business
meetings on the move
Inside
Mercedes' autonomous concept car, the F 015
Old and
new
While only about 10% of cars are connected to the internet
today, that number is expected to balloon to 90% by 2020, according to the
consulting group Machina Research.
The big question is who will be behind the software that
connects cars - traditional car manufacturers like Mercedes and General Motors,
or Silicon Valley giants like Apple and Google, who have turned their attention
towards Detroit?
Both tech firms have come out with in-car entertainment
operating systems in the last year.
"There is a huge
battle between the tech giants and auto firms right now," says Bryan
Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
(MIT's) AgeLab and the associate director of the New England University
Transportation Center.
"The question is: are
you going to go to the dealer five years from now and have the choice of an
Apple interface, an Android interface or a [traditional] manufacturer's
interface?"
Special
Report: Global Car Industry
Staying
agnostic
For now, most of the car firms, whose offerings are on display
in Detroit, are playing it safe by keeping their options open - while keeping
their ears to the ground about what's happening in Silicon Valley.
Take Ford, for example.
Mark Fields, the company's chief executive, told the BBC that
the company was planning to open a Palo Alto office next week, to ensure that
it remained close to Silicon Valley while considering its options.
"I think there are a lot of interested parties in what they
call the fourth screen now - the screen within the vehicle," says Mr
Fields.
"There are a lot of competitors that we recognized, a lot
of competitors we didn't recognize, and there are probably a bunch of
competitors that haven't been born yet that want a piece of the auto
industry."
Don Butler,
Ford's executive director of connected vehicle and services, says the firm is
"device agnostic"
Ford's
strategy has been to continue to develop its software in house, while making
sure that it is compatible with the latest tech offerings from elsewhere. It
unveiled the latest version of its in-car entertainment software, Sync 3, at
the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week, which featured upgrades like the
ability to update the software wirelessly, as well as enabling it to interact
with apps such as Spotify and AccuWeather.
Notably,
the company also switched from using Microsoft software to Blackberry's QNX
operating system.
Yet Don
Butler, Ford's executive director of connected vehicle and services, said the
company was still committed to remaining "device agnostic". "Whether
you've got a Blackberry, iPhone, or any of the various flavours of Android
device, your phone will be compatible with the Sync system," says Mr
Butler. Car makers
are now competing with tech firms to design the software that connects cars
Keeping up
The
crucial challenge for everyone will be to keep up with changing
technology."We're willing to toss out a smartphone every year or so but
vehicles need to last 10 years," says MIT's Mr Reimer. "No-one is
going to have their iPhone 6 in their hands 20 years from now."This need
to predict what consumers will want in five, 10 or 20 years is complicated by
the fact the industry suffers from a data problem.
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