Automotive IT -- The manufacturing industry, including the world’s automakers and suppliers, has been putting in a lot of effort to improve production processes through the introduction of new, connected, technologies. “Industry 4.0,” which involves the networking of machinery and processes, is on track in many companies.

But logistics, arguably as important as the actual manufacturing of products, appears to be a somewhat neglected area. “Connectivity between transport, delivery and supplier is lacking,” says Heiko Breier, a logistics expert at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. “So far, these units are traditionally all operating independently.”

That’s unfortunate. As Breier points out, all participants in the process could benefit from an integrated approach to information sharing.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.automotiveit.com/point-of-view-a-need-for-connected-logistics/news/id-0010427

Technology Review -- “Where would you like to go?” Siri asked.

It was a sunny, slightly dreamy morning in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I was sitting in the passenger seat of what seemed like a perfectly ordinary new car. There was something strangely Apple-like about it, though. There was no mistaking the apps arranged across the console screen, nor the deadpan voice of Apple’s virtual assistant, who, as backseat drivers go, was pretty helpful. Summoned via a button on the steering wheel and asked to find sushi nearby, Siri read off the names of a few restaurants in the area, waited for me to pick one, and then showed the way on a map that appeared on the screen.

The vehicle was, in fact, a Hyundai Sonata. The Apple-like interface was coming from an iPhone connected by a cable. Most carmakers have agreed to support software from Apple called CarPlay, as well as a competing product from Google, called Android Auto, in part to address a troubling trend: according to research from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit group, more than 25 percent of road accidents are a result of a driver’s fiddling with a phone. Hyundai’s car, which goes on sale this summer, will be one of the first to support CarPlay, and the carmaker had made the Sonata available so I could see how the software works.

CarPlay certainly seemed more intuitive and less distracting than fiddling with a smartphone behind the wheel. Siri felt like a better way to send texts, place calls, or find directions. The system has obvious limitations: if a phone loses the signal or its battery dies, for example, it will stop working fully. And Siri can’t always be relied upon to hear you correctly. Still, I would’ve gladly used CarPlay in the rental car I’d picked up at the San Francisco airport: a 2013 Volkswagen Jetta. There was little inside besides an air-conditioning unit and a radio. The one technological luxury, ironically, was a 30-pin cable for an outdated iPhone. To use my smartphone for navigation, I needed a suction mount, an adapter for charging through the cigarette lighter, and good eyesight. More than once as I drove around, my iPhone came unstuck from the windshield and bounced under the passenger seat.

Android Auto also seemed like a huge improvement. When a Google product manager, Daniel Holle, took me for a ride in another Hyundai Sonata, he plugged his Nexus smartphone into the car and the touch screen was immediately taken over by Google Now, a kind of super-app that provides recommendations based on your location, your Web searches, your Gmail messages, and so on. In our case it was showing directions to a Starbucks because Holle had searched for coffee just before leaving his office. Had a ticket for an upcoming flight been in his in-box, Holle explained, Google Now would’ve automatically shown directions to the airport. “A big part of why we’re doing it is driver safety,” he said. “But there’s also this huge opportunity for digital experience in the car. This is a smart driving assistant.”

CarPlay and Android Auto not only give Apple and Google a foothold in the automobile but may signal the start of a more significant effort by these companies to reinvent the car. If they could tap into the many different computers that control car systems, they could use their software expertise to reimagine functions such as steering or collision avoidance. They could create operating systems for cars.

Google has already built its own self-driving cars, using a combination of advanced sensors, mapping data, and clever navigation and control software. There are indications that Apple is now working on a car too: though the company won’t comment on what it terms “rumors and speculation,” it is hiring dozens of people with expertise in automotive design, engineering, and strategy. Vans that belong to Apple, fitted with sensors that might be useful for automated driving, have been spotted cruising around California.

Read the rest of the story here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/538446/rebooting-the-automobile/

2/22/2016, NY Times -- On the 36th floor of a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper, the actors Ice Cube and Kevin Hart joshed with fans inside a glass-walled radio studio one afternoon last month. They were in the broadcast headquarters of SiriusXM, and across the lobby, near Howard Stern’s dedicated wing, Brooke Shields posed for selfies with three “Sesame Street” puppets, while Senator Rand Paul — at that point, still a candidate for president — hovered with a small entourage. Overhead, a screen announced the imminent arrival of the thrash-metal band Anthrax.

By any measure, it was an odd cross section of pop culture. Surveying the scene, Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s chief content officer, smiled and declared, “This is how I like it — just this diverse.”

At SiriusXM, the satellite-radio network, executives use terms like “mosaic,” “bundle” and, inevitably, “curated” to describe the company’s mix of programming. With more than 175 channels, SiriusXM has much more variety than typical AM/FM radio but a small fraction of the ads. It has channels dedicated to the Grateful Dead and the Metropolitan Opera; five feeds of thumping electronic dance music; every pro baseball, football and basketball game; and, of course, Mr. Stern’s blend of raunchy humor and celebrity interviews. Around the Super Bowl, it had 162 hours of live programming related to the game that ran across 22 shows on 10 channels.

Once flirting with bankruptcy, SiriusXM has quietly become a financial powerhouse at a time when other radio and digital music outlets are struggling to make a profit, and also as the behavior of so-called cord cutters — who cancel their cable TV subscriptions to pick and choose their entertainment online (and to save money) — has made Wall Street nervous about the future of bundled media. SiriusXM last year earned $510 million on $4.6 billion in revenue, and renewed major deals with Mr. Stern and the National Football League.

“This has been a remarkable success story against huge odds,” said Barton Crockett, a media analyst with FBR Capital Markets. “Most of the investing public thought there was no way this would work, spending huge amounts of capital to launch satellites and put equipment in cars. But they were right. This is a great business.”

SiriusXM has hit on the formula for getting people — nearly 30 million of them — to pay for radio, a form of media that has always been free. But while the company likes to emphasize the awesomeness of its audio “mosaics,” there is another, more mundane, explanation for its success: cars.

SiriusXM pays about $1 billion a year in subsidies and revenue splits to automakers, and according to the company, 75 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States come with satellite radio installed. (It works with every major carmaker.) Of the 29.6 million subscribers to SiriusXM at the end of last year, 24.2 million paid the $11 to $20 monthly fee themselves, with the rest covered through promotions by car companies.

Yet cars are changing in ways that could threaten SiriusXM’s position. New technologies, loosely referred to as the connected car, are bringing the Internet to the dashboard. For drivers, that means that various new audio apps — many of them free — will soon be available at a touch. For SiriusXM, that means a lot of new competition in the car, the place where consumers listen to radio the most. This process has already begun, with Apple and Google pushing for their own car media platforms, and Mr. Meyer said that he expected the technology to be in most new cars by the end of this decade. Will listeners still fork over $15 for SiriusXM if they can just as easily tune in to Spotify, Pandora or Beats 1 from Apple?

“The major enemy of SiriusXM these days is Internet radio,” said Jack Nerad, executive editorial director of Kelley Blue Book. “It’s important for Sirius to be in automobiles, but I think that for the car companies, it’s going to be just another programming source.”

Mr. Meyer, who spent years managing the company’s relationships with Detroit before he became chief executive in 2012, has been hearing this refrain for a long time. But he said that SiriusXM was well positioned for the change, with plans for a new, more interactive version of its radio system, code-named SXM17, and the advantage of knowing that car companies make changes to their machines very slowly. “Even when you’re Apple,” Mr. Meyer said, “they will still live with the speed carmakers want to go.”

Phil Abram, the chief infotainment officer of General Motors, said that Pandora, as well as platforms like Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, have had no significant effect on how many of its customers subscribe to SiriusXM.

“People like to have a plethora of content,” Mr. Abram said. “One day you might want to listen to music on your iPhone, the next day talk radio, and the next day you want a curated set of music from a company like SiriusXM. We want to try to make it as easy as possible for our customers to enjoy whichever they want.”

Satellite radio’s fortunes have not always been so rosy. After years of planning and investment in the 1990s, the new medium began broadcasting in the early 2000s from two companies, Sirius and XM. For years both lost money as they competed to build their programming slates and sign multimillion-dollar deals with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart.

The biggest catch, by far, was Mr. Stern, who signed a five-year, $500 million deal with Sirius to begin broadcasting at the start of 2006. His arrival instantly put satellite radio on the map. Sirius and XM merged in 2008 — during the recession, when car sales were plummeting. After nearly going bankrupt under the weight of its debt, the combined SiriusXM was saved by a last-minute infusion of capital from Liberty Media, the cable and entertainment empire controlled by John C. Malone, which in early 2009 lent $530 million in exchange for preferred shares convertible into 40 percent of the common stock of the company.

Gregory B. Maffei, Liberty’s chief executive and the chairman of SiriusXM, recalled that at the time of the deal, a colleague told him, “Either the world ends, or we’re going to make a lot of money.” They made a lot of money. SiriusXM repaid the loans in five months, and the roughly 62 percent stake that Liberty now has in the company — which is formally known as Sirius XM Holdings — is worth about $11 billion.

SiriusXM’s strategy for competing with free radio has been to give people a lot of the radio they like — music, sports, talk, news — and minimize what they do not, namely commercials. That means the station’s programmers do not feel the ratings pressures that bedevil terrestrial radio.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/business/media/siriusxm-fights-to-dominate-the-dashboard-of-the-connected-car.html?_r=0

World Highways -- A new study shows that the risk level of a driver’s likelihood of a crash can be determined accurately. An independent study carried out by driver behaviour specialist CAS for Risk Technology shows that data collected by automotive telematics devices can accurately predict the likelihood of a motorist having a crash. CAS carried out its research with 1,291 drivers who were insured by a leading UK firm and had telematics devices installed in their vehicles. The study examined how driver behaviour affects the chance of a driver being involved in an incident and the potential to make an insurance claim.
CAS concluded that the Risk Technology driver scoring methodology provides a good prediction of a driver’s potential to be involved in crashes. It takes several key factors into consideration and analyses this information more accurately than other technology.
The study investigated the accuracy of five key indicators used by Risk to predict driver behaviour, including: speed of driving, braking force, acceleration speed, whether or not the drive is taking place on an urban road, and or whether it is day or night time.
This information was collected from each driver’s telematics device and compared against the cause of any crashes or damages recorded by the insurer. The main reasons recorded for accidents included a lack of hazard perception, poor basic steering skills, loss of control of the vehicle, and not maintaining a safe distance from other vehicles.
Different crash types are best predicted by different combinations of factors. For example, driver’s braking score was shown to be a very good predictor of loss of control, and is currently the most useful indicator to insurers for predicting this type of crash.

11-7-2016, Manufacturing Business Technology -- The connected car is already yesterday’s big news, being the buzzing new tech development in the automotive industry for close to a decade now. As the industry approaches mass commercialization of this technology, with manufacturers already having launched their connected car solutions, it is only logical that connected cars are billed as the next wave of disruption in the auto industry. Despite the hype, penetration of connected cars in the U.S. today is at only nine percent [Statista], but this doesn’t mean there isn’t potential.

Despite visible excitement, one of the main reasons behind low adoption is that the average car owner doesn’t see value in owning a connected car. This means the value that is expected and the actual perceived value that is delivered are not aligned. Cars are depreciating ‘assets’ and quickly lose value. That said, the added costs of insurance, routine maintenance and services such as connected infotainment, drive reports, remote functions and elementary diagnostics, are beneficial but do not add enough value to justify the extra spend. Independent market studies also indicate similar insights, highlighting a whopping 43 percent who reported ‘lack of need’ as the biggest barrier for adoption. It’s no surprise that there is a faster adoption in the commercial truck segment, where telematics bring distinct value to truck drivers and fleet owners.

An Opportunity to Create Value

Cars are unique in that they offer a more personal experience and typically have a longer ownership tenure as well.

Car owners are increasingly becoming more tech savvy and stay constantly connected. They also spend a considerable amount of time in the car, as the traffic condition is worsening day by day. According to the AAA foundation for Safety, Americans spend well over 300 hours a year on driving! 

This creates an opportunity to engage the driver/owner constantly throughout the ownership cycle, and offer personalized services to redefine the in-car experience. Automotive OEMs need to re-visualize ‘Connected Cars’ as a hub for service providers, insurers, ecosystem players and technology companies — to offer innovative solutions.

Auto OEMs make great cars and provide great services, but they have a limited and disconnected consumer ecosystem. Connected cars provide an incredible opportunity to disrupt this by opening up the potential for tremendous ecosystem play and creating additional revenue generation channels.

An integrated ecosystem can offer a plethora of value additions through a connected car, ranging from providing critical/emergency services (Faster emergency response can save around 2,500 lives per year in case of road accidents) to predictive component failure alerts and automated/proactive maintenance appointment bookings. All of these can be empowered with analytics-driven insights, allowing the owner to make more informed decisions based on component usage trends, closest available dealerships and vehicle health. Insights can shed light into the history of a car’s ownership with information such as prolonged wear and tear, usage/abuse trends, enabling the subsequent owners (auctioneers, scrap yards, independent dealerships, used car valuation services and used car inspection outlets) of the car to aptly analyze and monetize their asset.

Rethinking the Car Ecosystem

Smartphones allows any developer in the world to create an application and engage consumers with their content. Soon, technology will enable cars to do the same. Auto manufacturers only need to equip cars with a platform that will enable all authorized ecosystem players/service providers to come and consume its data. Whether it be insurance providers or the friendly ride-sharing services, application programming interfaces (APIs) could provide helpful insights to better services consumers. This essentially helps multiple ecosystem players move away from independent CapEx (capital expenditure) models into a co-share OpEx (operating expenditure) model — and the auto manufacturer always gets its share of the business in a sustainable fashion.

The connected car ecosystem also allows interesting innovations and new business models. For example, connected delivery or ‘roam’ delivery, where goods are delivered directly to one’s connected car instead of one’s home, can save time and reduce failed deliveries. The connected car also opens up possibilities for smart taxation and governance through programs such as ‘per mile road tax’, where road tax is charged by miles driven instead. Tomorrow, a consumer’s smart car and smart home can communicate with each other to provide utilitarian services using connected devices and software

Read the rest of the story HERE. 

USA Today -- Toyota announced an enhanced relationship with Microsoft on Monday aimed at delivering "connected car" services to drivers in ways they probably never could have imagined.

For instance, artificial-intelligence features could be added to cars that allow them to know where the car is going and offer services drivers might want along the way. Going to the baseball game this weekend? The car might detect the route a driver normally takes and recommend restaurants for a pre-game lunch.

Toyota Connected, as the partnership will be known, "will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology. It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity,” said Zack Hicks, the chief information officer of Toyota Motor North America who was appointed CEO of Toyota Connected.

Already, drivers ask the infotainment system in their cars for restaurant recommendations, but many locations often would require that a driver turn around. But with Toyota Connected, the system might be modified to only recommend restaurants on the highway ahead — and then only the kinds of food that the driver usually prefers.

The services offered can be tailored to individual customers. "We don't want to dump everything on everyone," said Sandy Lobenstein, executive vice president of Toyota Connected. "The whole is idea is getting to know our customers better."

Road information can be delivered to drivers based on driving patterns — knowing the routes they usually take. Auto insurance could be priced more accurately because the system could report on a driver's actual miles and routes traveled.

Medical-related sensors could also be built into the car, like heartbeat monitors or sensors on the steering wheel. Some of the services could be offered to customers wirelessly by being beamed directly into their cars, but Lobenstein said that customer privacy considerations will be paramount.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/04/04/toyota-connected-car-microsoft/82602066/

Fleet Owner -- The trucking industry is expected to undergo significant and continued “transformation” due to ongoing incorporation of more active safety technologies, such as collision mitigation, and factory-installed telematics systems, according to a panel discussion at the 2015 Commercial Vehicle Outlook Conference last week in Dallas, Texas.

Stephen Hampson, president and GM of Meritor WABCO, and Chris Hines, executive VP for Zonar Systems, both argued that various technologies will not only continue to make the industry safer – reducing crashes and helping identify bad driving habits – but also help boost fleet profitability as well, particularly via increased vehicle uptime.

“We’re witnessing an evolution of safety systems that integrate multiple technologies such as lane departure warning (LDW), electronic stability control (ESC), telematics and data/video capture devices,” Hampson said.

“We’re also now starting to share data through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology as well,” he added. “All of that will help improve vehicle and driver performance, not only to reduce crashes but to pave the way for semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicles as well.”

Reducing the severity of crashes – if not eliminating them altogether – is what will help fleets achieve payback from their safety system investments, Hampson stressed.

For example, he pointed to the projected benefits from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) impending ESC mandate for tractor-trailers.

Assuming that all existing 5-axle tractor-trailers operating on U.S. roads get fitted with ESC, the expected annual safety benefit is 4,659 fewer crashes, 126 fewer fatalities, and 5,909 fewer injuries, all while saving $1.5 billion a year in crash-related expenses.

Hampson also noted that the rapid changes occurring to newer safety technologies, such as Meritor WABCO’s OnGuard collision mitigation system, should further reduce accidents.

March 9, 2016, Governing.com -- The storm that rolled through Ann Arbor, Mich., in late November brought nine inches of snow and an experimental opportunity too good to pass up. A team of Ford engineers working to develop self-driving vehicles decided it would be a good time to put their modified Ford Fusion sedans to the test.

Snow, like rain, can be especially tricky for automated vehicles. Precipitation makes it harder for driverless cars to know where they are. Their cameras can’t see lines on snow-covered pavement or in the reflections of puddles. Falling precipitation interferes with radar. Piles of snow make finding the curbs and road edges harder, even for the cars’ laser-powered mapping devices. On top of that, snow is something of a novelty for self-driving cars. Most of them have been confined to sunny locales in states like California, Nevada and Texas, where rain and snow are rarer.

So the Ford team jumped at the chance to test their vehicles in the Michigan winter. Rather than heading to Ford’s proving grounds in Dearborn, they went to Mcity, a 32-acre test track in north Ann Arbor. It’s a shared track that’s operated by the University of Michigan and used by automakers and the state transportation department to try out autonomous and connected cars. Mcity includes elements you wouldn’t expect to find on most test tracks, things like stoplights that broadcast information to vehicles, a railroad crossing, a bus stop, highway on-ramps and gantries, a small hill, gravel roads, sidewalk crossings, stop signs, a simulated tree canopy and overpass, roundabouts, vandalized traffic signs, and a mockup of downtown city blocks.

11-8-2017, Information-Age.com -- It’s hard to believe that Ford introduced the Model T more than a century ago. Switching to an assembly line manufacturing technique completely transformed the automotive industry and made car ownership a possibility for the mass population. Since then, there has been little in the way of truly disruptive automotive technology.

As some of the biggest innovators of our generation – Google and Apple – set their sight on the connected car, it’s clear that the wind may be about to change. Modern-day innovators are joining forces with established automotive manufacturers, and their vision – powered by the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) – could revolutionise travel beyond recognition.

The transformation

The majority of the time, a personal vehicle is parked. In the sharing economy, a connected car could broadcast itself as being available for use at various times of day.

IoT connectivity is key to enable that vehicle to be remotely opened by the person reserving the car, to track where the car is and provide reminders about return time, etc. Now that car becomes a source of potential revenue for its owner, just like Airbnb for dwellings.

Automakers – such as Volvo, Daimler and GM – as well as the likes of Uber, Google and Apple, are already looking at what it takes to get to autonomous vehicles. And small fleets are already being deployed in controlled environments.

That said, truly autonomous cars becoming a mass market reality will take years according to most experts. But once they are mainstream, and the technology is blended with ride sharing, it will deliver unprecedented levels of disruption to the car industry.

Accelerating the need for 5G

High-speed/high-bandwidth mobile networks will play an absolutely critical role in the car of the future. Cellular networks already underpin the ride sharing revolution, and without IoT there can be no truly connected car. At present, smaller fleet of autonomous cars can easily be handled by an LTE network. And the advent of 5G networks and technology will help make sure that when connected vehicle numbers hit critical mass, the networks will still be able to handle the load.

Cisco Jasper provides a platform that enables the control of that connectivity, working in partnership with the world’s mobile operators to enable automakers to not only manage their vehicles’ connectivity, but to deliver myriad connected services. One of the advantages of connected vehicles is that automakers can constantly introduce new connected services that help evolve the driving experience over time. And as more of these connected services are introduced, the greater the need for 5G networks that can support the increased network demands.

Navigating connectivity in the here and now

In Europe, the basic services that will come to market first – due to eCall – will be safety and security in the form of automatic crash notification. This is not new in other markets like North America, but a majority of the OEMs in Europe are yet to launch eCall.

Beyond consumer applications, there are also safety implications for fleet drivers, with new services that help prevent them from falling asleep while driving. Electronic log books will keep track of the number of hours a fleet driver has been awake and driving, providing alerts when it is time to rest to help prevent potential accidents due to drowsy driving.

Over-the-air software/firmware updates are going to play a crucial role in a world where cars are digitally controlled. A connected car designed with upgradeable electronic component units will bring forth a revolution on what is considered a new car versus a new-feature car.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

10-24-2016 -- It's a jungle out there on US roads. There's a near-constant jockeying for position as everyone attempts to get where they're going as fast as they can via overcrowded highways and streets.

In reality, drivers all exist somewhere along a spectrum, with the unnecessarily aggressive on one end, the overly cautious on the other, and the rest falling somewhere in between. Drivers are constantly processing information and anticipating what their fellow motorists may do based on a variety of factors, often without consciously thinking about it.

Most experienced drivers innately assess such situations, but they will soon have to contend with autonomous vehicles (AVs) being thrown into the mix. Like humans, AVs will have to react to the actions of other drivers, but also other drivers' reaction to them. More aggressive drivers could take advantage of AVs' hesitancy, while others may not know how to socially relate to robo-cars. Things could become really complicated, according to a recent study.

Bullying Robo-Cars
Perhaps not surprisingly, a study from The London School of Economics and Goodyear found that AVs could be easily bullied by more assertive drivers. But the survey also found that so-called "cooperative" drivers—those who "see driving more as a social activity and enjoy the interaction with other drivers on the road"—are actually more apprehensive about self-driving cars.

The survey's "driving sociability" index used the common scenario of letting another driver cut in front of you—or cutting in front of another driver—as cars merge into a single lane as a gauge of whether someone would be considered more a "cooperative" road user. Ninety percent of those who landed in the top half of the driving sociability scale said they would never or only occasionally cut the line.

But of the more "combative" half, 42 percent, said that they would "sometimes, usually, or always" cut in on another driver. And aggressive drivers would feel even less remorse about cutting off an autonomous vehicle, while more social drivers may not know how to deal with a robo-car.

"If you view the road as a social space, you will consciously negotiate your journey with other drivers," the survey said. "People who like that negotiation process appear to feel less comfortable engaging with AVs than with human drivers.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

Forbes, 4-17-2017 -- Imagine driving through toll booths, drive thru restaurants and gas stations without having to fiddle around with cash and coins. The future is calling for a world in which payments are seamless and with the experimentation and the introduction of self-driving cars, your car being in sync with your bank account is where technology is heading. Imagine if your car was your wallet.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has recently overtaken General Motors to become the most valuable car company in the US. According to Reuters, Tesla ended yesterday with a stock market value of nearly $51 billion which was $1 million more than GM. At the end of 2015, Juniper Research predicted that self-driving cars will take off by the year 2021 and there will be approximately 20 million vehicles on the road by 2025. With the emergence and rapid success of Tesla, these predictions could become a reality.

However, Juniper ranked Tesla as the third most promising player in the driverless car market, below Google and Volvo, after being in development for the longest and having logged the most autonomous miles. I spoke to representatives from FIS and SAP to find out what technology they are working on to ensure society has in-car payments in the future.

This technology, as Brown explained, is all voice-activated and as many predict the rise of biometric technology in payments, this could be how the boom cements itself in society. Brown said that a ‘voice-print’ would enable you to authenticate yourself or a payment account and pay for a transaction ‘hands-free’. ‘This is essential to the safety of in car payments,’ Brown said. A recent New York Times article discussed how soon a car will be able to read a human’s expression because of biometrics.

Read the rest of the story HERE.