The next chapter in car infotainment: seamless mobile integration

Tina Jeffrey

According to a survey from Forrester Research, 50% of North Americans who plan to buy cars in the next 12 months say that technology options will play an important role in their purchasing decisions. The fact is, consumers want to remain connected all the time; they don’t want to park their digital lifestyle while driving. This begs the question: what’s an automaker to do?

Allow consumers to bring in content and apps on their mobile devices. We are becoming increasingly attached to our smartphones, and this is driving a trend towards mobile-centric car infotainment. The trend is of particular benefit to buyers of low-end vehicles, in which built-in features such as navigation and speech recognition can be cost prohibitive. A smartphone-driven head unit reduces costs by leveraging the existing connectivity and processing power of the mobile device; it also provides easy access to apps the consumer has already downloaded. In fact, integration between the mobile device and head unit offers numerous benefits: it helps the car keep pace with the consumer-device lifecycle, it endows the car with app store capabilities, and it lets the car connect to the cloud through the mobile device, eliminating the need for a built-in connection.

Using the phone's connectivity and

processing power to deliver apps and
software updates.

Design in-vehicle systems to be compatible with all leading smartphones. To satisfy this requirement, the vehicle must support both proprietary and standards-based connectivity protocols, using Bluetooth, USB, and Wi-Fi. Automakers will need to deliver platforms that include support for CarPlay, iPod Out (for older Apple devices), DLNA (for BlackBerry phones and other devices), MirrorLink, and Miracast, as well as the solution that the Open Automotive Alliance (OAA) promises to reveal later this year. By offering this widespread connectivity, automakers can avoid snubbing any significant portion of their prospective customer base.

Leverage and enable the mobile development community to build the apps consumers want. With companies like Apple and Google now in the fray, native brought-in apps will be a certainty, but automakers should continue to embrace HTML5 as an application platform, given its ”write once, run anywhere” mantra. HTML5 remains the most widely used cross-platform application environment and it gives automakers access to the largest pool of developers worldwide. And, as the first W3C vehicle information API specification is ratified, HTML5 application developers will be able to access vehicle information and develop compelling, car-appropriate apps that become an integral part of our daily commute.

Tackling fragmentation with a standard vehicle information API

Tina Jeffrey

Has it been a year already? In February 2013 QNX Software Systems became a contributing member of the W3C’s Automotive Web Platform Business Group, which is dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Web technologies in the auto industry. Though it took a while to rev up, the group is now in full gear and we’re making excellent progress towards our first goal of defining a vehicle information API for passenger vehicles.

The plan is to establish a standard API for accessing speed, RPM, tire pressure, and other vehicle data. The API will enable consistent app development across automakers and thereby reduce the fragmentation that affects in-vehicle infotainment systems. Developers will be able to use the API for apps running directly on the head unit as well as for apps running on mobile devices connected to the head unit.

Parallel processing
Let me walk you through our work to date. To get started, we examined API specifications from four member organizations: QNX, Webinos, Intel, and GENIVI. Next, we collected a superset of the attributes from each spec and categorized each attribute into one of several functional groups: vehicle information, running status, maintenance, personalization, driving safety, climate/environment, vision systems, parking, and electric vehicles. Then, we divvied up these functional groups among teams who worked in parallel: each team drafted an initial API for their allotted functional group before sharing it with the members at large.

Throughout this effort, we documented a set of API creation guidelines to capture the intent and reasoning behind our decisions. These guidelines cover details such as data representation, attribute value ranges and increments, attribute naming, and use of callback functions. The guidelines also capture the rules that govern how to grow or extend the APIs, if and when necessary.

Driving towards closure
In December the business group editors began to pull the initial contributions into a single draft proposal. This work is progressing and will culminate in a member’s face-to-face meeting mid-March in Santa Clara, California, where we will review the draft proposal in its entirety and drive this first initiative towards closure.

I’m sure there will be lots more to talk about, including next potential areas of focus for the group. If you're interested in following our progress, here’s a link to the draft API.

Enjoy!