Connected Cars: Challenges And Opportunities For The Automotive Sector

We are living in the future we all collectively envisioned yesterday. From our books, science-fiction movies, songs, and other pop-cultural offspring’s, all of us imagined a world of ultra-machines. Devices and everyday things that had super-cool capabilities. Well, in the last decade, rapid innovation and tech disruptions have given life to some of our wildest imaginations.

From cars that did only the job of transporting people from one point to another now pull off feats unheard of before. They can talk to us and other cars, make autonomous decisions and do more. We also have driverless cars that have almost bridged the gap between science and imagination.

But all these advancements have had their fair share of hindrances and concerns. For breakthroughs to happen, scientists, companies, researchers, and tech experts had to struggle through sleepless nights. And this post is all about such challenges and shortcomings in the connected cars sector that are still left unsolved as far as commercial applications of them are concerned.

So, if you have a connected car business, a manufacturing plant, or a niche fleet of cars designed for specific purposes, this post is just for you. In this part of our Digital Transformation in the Automotive Sector Guide series, we breakdown the practical difficulties in running connected cars and their tech-powered solutions.

For our new followers and readers, we have been rolling out Digital Transformation Guides for diverse markets and niches such as real estate, education, retail, and more. You can check them out. You can also read through our previous chapters on automotive life cycle concerns and their solutions and generic overview on innovations in the automotive industry to get an extensive idea on the subject.

And if you've been following us for a while, you know the drill.

What are we waiting for? Let's get started.

Some Important Statistics On Connected Cars

• In 2019, the connected car market (global) was valued at around $63.03bn. By 2027, this number is anticipated to grow to $225.1bn at a 17.1% CAGR.
• Close to $3.9bn has been pumped into the connected cars industry as investments by investors across the globe.
• A 2019 report revealed that there are close to 5 million connected cars in the world.

Challenges In Connected Cars

Despite sounding super exciting, connected cars attract tons of challenges and problems during and even post-development. While you may think that the problems mostly stem from external factors such as road safety, the reality is that the concerns are internal as well. For a connected car to do its job right, its devices such as sensors, imaging devices, embedded systems, circuitries, cloud solutions and more should all be working intact and in tandem with each other.

To give you a better idea of the topic, here is a complete list of the challenges you might experience.

Communication Among Car, App, And Cloud

A connected car is made up of three elements – the physical car, the app where most of the processing of data generated happens, and the cloud, where the data is stored and retrieved for data processing. For optimum safety and accurate operations of a connected car, the data generated by sensors and devices should communicate data to the cloud, which then has to transmit the data to the app.

The app then analyses the data and runs it through function-specific algorithms to offer the user the right piece of information. And all these actions should happen in less than a second so drivers receive real-time information on whatever they are seeking. Even a minor delay or miscommunication or data distortion could prove to be consequential to both the car and the driver.

Navigation Of Cars

The navigation of cars is a crucial problem when there are no embedded navigational systems. In the absence of humans – in the case of driverless cars – there would be no guiding force to dictate the connected car system, where it should be heading to. 

Tracing The Location

Connected cars need to be connected not just to the internet but to the satellite for navigation and location tracking purposes as well. This would enable drivers, fleet owners, and other stakeholders to trace the location of the vehicle and establish other safety protocols. 

Enablement Of Mobile Functionality

The primary aim of mobile functionality enablement is to prevent drivers from getting frequently distracted from using their smartphones while driving. Be it calls or messages, drivers tend to easily deviate from driving to check notifications. This is not only dangerous for the driver but for other surrounding vehicles as well. 

Keep Track of Car Health

One of the primary responsibilities of connected cars is to connect all the modules and components of a car and digitize them for optimum insights generation. When devices and sensors take over the responsibility of monitoring car and components health, they can consistently generate data and information on probable malfunctions, faults, and errors in-car components, service requests, upgrade recommendations, and more. But for that to happen, connected cars need the right applications, processing algorithms, and hardware peripherals.

Consistent Requirement of The Internet

When the name of the tech concept is connected cars, it's a giveaway that these vehicles need perpetual availability of internet connectivity. Connected cars are advanced implementations of the Internet of Things, where all transactions and data exchanges happen over the internet.

And every second, a massive chunk of data is generated from multiple sensors and imaging devices for exhaustive insights to users. This requires unlimited connectivity to the internet. What's more challenging is that the car is in motion most of the time, which means wireless internet has to be made available through the course of the journey.

Multiple Language

The role of advanced tech is to make life easier and be inclusive to its users. That's why regionalizing languages is essential. If a common language is deployed in this technology, people from around the world – from different cultural and geographical backgrounds – would find it difficult to use the technology. And with connected devices already coming with a significant learning curve, an additional barrier in the form of language will only add to the confusion.

Route Management

Finding the most ideal route to reach a specific destination from a terminal is a daunting task. Without an ideal system, cars might have to drive through bad road conditions, increased traffic, narrow lanes, and more. 

Rider Behaviour

A connected car should keep track of the overall state of the car, which not only includes its modules and components but riding behaviour as well. Riding patterns can give users ample information on fuel consumption and overall vehicle health.

And for that, the right algorithms need to be deployed and detect patterns from the right data sets and parameters such as speed, hard braking, hard cornering, lane discipline, pitstops, fuel components, seat-belt discipline, usage of mobile phones, and more.

Solutions

The challenges discussed have tech-based fixes. Let's look at all the options available to us right now.

Connected And Internet Cars: Cluster, Mobile, And Cloud App

Connectivity

Tailor-made software applications and central management systems can be developed keeping in mind the distinct requirements in the automotive sector. These systems will act as the elements that bring together the vehicle, the mobile app and the cloud for the entire system to work as one individual unit and offer benefits to drivers and passengers.

Navigation

Drivers need not look at a screen while driving anymore. They can continue to focus on the road and let the system dictate the route for navigation. Every single turn and roundabout turns can be accurately tracked and assisted for advanced navigation.

Rider Behaviour Analysis

From current and past driving history, the connected car can keep a consistent track of riding behaviour and offer visualizations of inferences. These charts can offer driver glimpses of riding behaviour such as speeding, braking, fuel consumption, and more and help them make informed decisions on driving disciplines. If this is deployed in fleet management networks, managers can seamlessly track and compare the driving behaviour of their workforce and corrective measures for optimized safety.

Mobile Mirror

Connected cars can also display calls, messages, and other notifications on connected mobile phones on the vehicle's interface systems. This prevents the driver from getting frequently distracted because of interruptions and instantly get an idea of the caller and messages on the screen or dashboards.

Car Report and Alerts

Vehicle health can be constantly tracked by the devices and their associated apps and frequent reports can be generated by the system and shared with stakeholders for viewership. A repository can be stored on the cloud for anytime retrieval.

Online And Offline Mode

The dependence on the internet can be eliminated and the system can function seamlessly offline as well. This makes it easier for the car and the driver to make use of the vehicle's functionalities in regions where there is no internet connectivity.

Multi-lingual

Simple lines of codes on translation can bring in multi-linguistic features to cars. All the messages, notifications, reports, and other details shared by the vehicle's system can be translated into regional languages for everyone to understand.

Behaviour Analysis In Connected Cars – Vehicle Cloud Platform Engineering

Cloud Connectivity

Some of the most disastrous accidents can be studied and prevented with the help of cloud-connected black boxes and telematics. These can provide the most accurate data on what went wrong and let manufacturers implement appropriate features to prevent such occurrences again. These can also offer drivers adequate details on probable instances when things can go wrong.

Geo-fencing And Monitoring

The location of connected cars can be tracked in real-time and notifications can be sent whenever they take a route that is not recommended by the system. This is what geo-fencing is all about. This technology makes use of GPS and RFID features to create a virtual boundary in navigation for the system to adhere to. Any changes to this navigation or crossing of the boundary by the vehicle will result in the instant triggering of alerts and notifications.

AI-Driven Systems

Artificial intelligence units consistently keep track of driving statistics, driver behaviour, and other parameters and alert them in case of risks and emergencies in advance. This will let the driver be precautious while driving and take the most secure driving decisions.

Fleet-owner Dashboard

Fleet owners can directly view auto-generated reports by the vehicle and get an idea of the driving behaviours of their fleet pilots. Depending on insights, they can recognize good driving, train poor driving or even penalize rash driving practices.

Connected Autonomous Vehicles – Vehicle Cloud Connectivity

Connectivity

Solid connectivity can be established between a connected autonomous vehicle and its app via local or wireless internet. These two can also be connected to the cloud for subsequent actions to be triggered.

Control

Similar to Tesla models, drivers can monitor the autonomous vehicle's navigations on their app when not driving.

Rider Behaviour Analysis

From current and past driving history, the connected car can keep a consistent track of riding behaviour and offer visualizations of inferences. These charts can offer driver glimpses of riding behaviour such as speeding, braking, fuel consumption, and more and help them make informed decisions on driving disciplines. If this is deployed in fleet management networks, managers can seamlessly track and compare the driving behaviour of their workforce and corrective measures for optimized safety.

Route Management

Connected autonomous vehicles can also automatically navigate through roads and routes by just specifying the points of termination and destination. The system will analyse the best routes considering road and weather conditions and take the most ideal ones to save time from traffic as well.

SOS and Alert Management

Driver and passenger safety can be maintained at all times with airtight SOS procedures and protocols that get triggered automatically in case of adverse events. And with features like geofencing and predictive analytics, they can go off even before something bad happens as well.

Empowered Automotive Ecosystem – Location-Based Services

Cloud Connectivity

A connected car can be connected to the web and apps for optimum utilization of location-based services such as over-the-air updates, service centers in the vicinity, fuel stations, usage-based insurance policies, and more.

Navigation Records

The routes taken by the vehicle can be recorded for future references and retrieval. Besides this, drivers and car owners can also monitor and modify vehicles' navigation from remote through apps.

Speed Behaviour

Reports and graphs on vehicle's speed can be tracked and stored to monitor the speed habits of drivers. From the reports, insights on top speed, average speed, ideal speed, and more can be viewed. With this information, the cap on top speed can be established for added safety.

T-Box

This a standard in connected cars that takes care of a lot of factors and features autonomously. This all-inclusive application offers ideal solutions such as remote car monitoring, safety supervision, remote control options, remote diagnosis, 4G-enabled communication, GPS, CAN communication, acceleration sensing and more. 

Case Study

For those of you running a fleet of connected cars for divers’ purposes, a few factors become essentials -

1. car health
2. driving patterns and discipline
3. and vehicle expenses

While there are no conventional ways to track driving discipline and car health, records on vehicle expenses are not completely fool-proof. For years, fleet owners have been suffering from practical difficulties stemming from these concerns.

To put an end to all these arrived GOFAR. The sole purpose because GOFAR was developed was to help your business save on vehicle fuel, get insights on car faults, avoid late payments of expenses and fines, track car health and do more.

How This Is Done?

To give you optimum insights on these angles, the company has rolled out an ecosystem of devices such as adapters, smartphone applications and top-notch devices. These are easy to set up and operate as well. The smartphone application taps into the car's computer to generate data on the required parameters and give you extensive reports on whatever information you need.

In simple words, GOFAR is designed to:

• notify you whenever your car has a fault
• remind you on insurance premiums, taxes and more
• minimize fuel expenses and increase fuel efficiency through data-driven decisions
• help you in tax deductions
• offer you advanced functionalities than what you would find on your GPS units
• provide you accurate descriptions of car concerns in layman terms and more

The brand has truly taken the concept of connected cars to another dimension. What do you think?

Future of Connected Cars: What's Next?

While connected cars are still futuristic concepts in several countries, researchers and tech experts are already working on future variants of this disruptive technology to elevate the driving experience and accommodate lifestyle changes.

From our observation, the future of connected cars involves the following innovations:

• experiences that go beyond regular infotainment, paving the way for cognitive mobility capabilities
• personalized riding experiences through telematics, content, infotainment, and other in-vehicle personalization aspects
• optimized vehicle-to-vehicle communication for more holistic data on road conditions, sudden braking, weather conditions, cornering, and more
• the rolling out of 5G and the dawn of an era of unlimited internet connectivity

Final Thoughts

The connected cars sector is a treasure-chest of potential, right? They are going to be mainstream tomorrow. With companies like Tesla, Uber, and more putting tech first to provide driver and road safety, connected cars will continue to evolve in their functionalities and capabilities.

That's why we recommend you deep-dive into the sector today with your game-changing idea and collaborate with us for all your software, embedded systems, OEM development, and other tech-centric needs.

We would help you integrate the best of technology for your connected car through advanced telematics, HMIs, and more.

Still, thinking? Reach out to us today.