Connected Sensor Cars

When I bought my semi-upper end Toyota Prius Prime last month, I was surprised that the Car was build with many sensors that it could do self-parking, alert me when I am wavering into another lane and even more automatically adjust the speed on cruise control when another Vehicle moves into my lane or its sees danger of collision with another slow moving one.

These were all possible because it leveraged different kinds of sensors built into the Car. There are many luxury and top-end cars which has more features than this one. The point I am trying to make is current and future’ cars are likely to have 100’s of different kinds of sensors for Safety, Ease of Use and more truly to be called Connected Cars a phase before Automatic Cars takes on our roads and have a paradigm shift including using Car As a Service (CAaS).

A quarter of 100 million cars produced a year globally, have sensors providing functionality ranging from Personal Health Monitoring ( Impaired Driver Check to Emergency services), Vehicle Care ( Vehicle Remote repairs, Breakdown Mgmt), Digital Marketing (Location based Offers, Couponing), Connected ADAS (Road Sign Detection, Road Condition Warning), Safety features (Stolen Vehicle Tracking) and other services like Concierge, Infotainment and other Customer focused support features.

Connected Cars are leveraged to support Community based sharing of information from curb side parking availability to providing assistance in traffic movement metrics on Speeds and Congestion information on any given road to local authorities. A good example of that is Waze a Google owned Free Navigation support mobile software that has revolutionized GPS navigation with real-time traffic alerts on congestion, obstacles and even Cops nearby during one's drive using this Community Sharing paradigm.

INRIX is another major traffic information aggregator providing travel information in real-time as well traffic patterns on the highways and local roads including intersections 24 X 7 to several private, municipalities and public institutions using its own GPS support navigation systems equipped in millions of Cars as well support from 3^rd Parties and Community globally. Navigation features enables it to provide Smart routing, Live traffic information besides providing Traffic prediction.

The one major feature that is radically changing and getting highly visible is with regards to Parking. Last year Waze has teamed up with INRIX to provide a feature called “Where to Park” to the customers enabling them to identify optimal parking spots as they drive off to their destination. Customer can select from any of the Parking Spots including Commercial and updated Curb-side Open spots in near real-time by weighing in the walking distance info to their destination provided by the app.

Last year 2016, Federal US DOT (Department of Transportation) has funded more than $45 millions in 3 major US cities of (NY, Florida, Wyoming) to operationalize cutting edge mobile and roadside technologies to reduce environmental impacts designed to save lives and improve personal mobility. In my opinion with millions of Connected Cars on the road, these vehicles would become the game changer and present a more viable option to address the desired goals of many such initiatives in place of permanent fixtures.

The next generation Autonomous (Automatic Cars) will have much more radical and paradigm shift in how we use travel modes from point A to point B with ease besides opening up the congested roads, infusion of Warehouse parking options, reduction of car ownership, garage space requirements and so forth.

It’s no more a futuristic trend, but real. We are in exciting time period to watch this travel mode unfold before our own eyes opening up opportunities and challenges with its adaptation.