Imagine for a second you’re the CEO of a car company. It takes, if you figure conservatively, around four years to bring a new car to market. What car would you build and what technology would it have on this inside? Keep in mind we’re talking about a car for 2017 here.
Firstly, you need to commission someone to design your car in a chic city like Los Angeles, Tokyo or Milan. If they don’t, it’s not going to look very nice in four years’ time when it eventually comes out. Secondly, you need factories, robots and skilled workers from all over the world who will build your car cost effectively.
Thirdly you need to test that car in the snow of Sweden and the heat of the Northern Cape to make sure not even the tiniest fault with the windscreen wiper or the door mirror lets the car down at the final hurdle.
And finally, probably a year away from launch, you must hand it over to your marketing people who will work with all their fingers and toes curled tight, hoping a project that was conceived four years ago, still has traction in the present.
It’s a thankless task, made graver still by the world’s economic unpredictability. As the CEO of your car company, you can’t just decide to ditch the SUV and make an eco-hatchback because petrol finally crept over R11 per litre.
You needed to know what the petrol price would be today, but you needed to know back in 2009. In 2009 it wouldn’t have seemed untoward to include a CD player in your car. Nowadays if you find a car with a CD player but no Aux/MP3/iPod connectivity, most reviewers are likely to mark it down for that.
First it was the tape/cassette player that was rendered to the scrapheap. Now car manufacturers are looking to send the in-dash radio and CD players into the museum along with it. We’ve already tested a Honda Brio that didn’t even have a CD player, and we’re not sure if it was a brave move or corner cutting?
Intelligent infotainment systems are fast expanding into cars’ interiors these days. Any vehicle without a system that isn’t centrally controlled from one outlet, either through a touchscreen or iDrive-type controller, is fast becoming dinousaurish in the market. Think Honda Civic which still makes do with a plethora of buttons and displays on various levels of the console and dashboard.
More than that, the way we consume media has also changed rapidly in the last half a decade. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at technology research firm Gartner Inc. says: “AM and FM as a delivering mechanism isn’t going to be the most important in cars anymore. By 2020, we’re confident consumers will consume radio content through avenues other than terrestrial broadcast.”
Smartphone connections to the internet have changed how infotainment systems work. Also, it is common to play your songs directly from your phone through a cable or Bluetooth connection anyway.
What about the next level of tech? Well, Koslowski says ‘integration’ and ‘versatility’ is the key for the future of infotainment systems. Many manufacturers are talking about high-speed mobile-internet connection capabilities too. Probably by then, Bluetooth will be on the way out, who knows?
