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Mobile Apps in Connected Vehicles

The tendency of using and developing various applications for our everyday usage has appeared in our lives already for a while, and ultimately is entering also the automotive field, making it a continuously growing sector. Surely the fact that apps improve safety and offer a better driving experience, providing information regarding the surrounding infrastructure, attracts the attention of car users and causes a rise in the number of new apps developed. 

This trend has such a great influence that now manufacturers are starting to design cars taking care of their interaction with mobile phones. For example, starting from 2017 Volvo will sell keyless cars, thanks to an app that makes it possible to open and start the vehicle remotely. 

Another sector that is involved and could coherently benefit from this innovation is car sharing. For instance, offering the possibility to private parties to share their cars directly with other people or to rent them to companies. The advantage of this is that it could help in the formation of so-called small car sharing companies that do not have high initial investments.

The safety aspect should also be concerned since guarantees for both parties are required, thus general health tests should be made together with the eventual alcohol and drug control. For the insurance aspects the general strategies could be adopted, like the one already used by the company Uber.

Regarding the safety problem it could be possible to make a test to check if the driver is in an altered condition. This test can have great influence since everyday there are car accidents due to the use of drugs and alcohol.

Talking about the successful parties on the market, the iOnRoad application could be introduced. The main functionality consists in guaranteeing a real time driving assistance, moreover warning the driver in the case of a possible collision or any other type of danger. The video recording service is also foreseen in order to assist in the critical situations, such as an accidental collision.

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The business related to V2X is evidently much more important than the ones individually linked to “traditional” technologies like PCs and smartphones. 

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Digital innovation effects on the working force

It is true that the possibility to directly connect vehicles with smartphones and the network will ruin some professional categories, but at the same time it will create new figures. In fact, the higher efficiency of machines relative to humans carrying out repetitive and standardised jobs will induce a reduction in the number of people working in production and assembly lines.

The new professional figures will have to cover roles demanding the capacity to adapt the decisional process to particular situations or to persuade potential customers to buy specific assets.

One of the biggest limit of machines is their incapability to interpret external situations, which requires a very high AI. For sure new businesses linked to insurances will arise, with a target switching from single users to producers and to usage based insurance programs. New business models are already being developed in order to be ready to meet the latest trends in the automotive field and keep the profits steadily high.

Automation is already very well established in the automotive industry, yet car manufacturers can still benefit from continuing developments in this field. Companies are able to remain competitive in increasingly challenging market conditions by taking full advantage of smart solutions designed to maximize efficiency and increase productivity.

Automated automotive factory

The ever-increasing utilisation of digital technologies in the automotive domain may create the need for specialised companies to design the communication system infrastructure required to connect vehicles to the surroundings. Carmakers may find it more convenient to outsource the development of software instead of investing internal resources on it.

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“Testing new technologies in a realistic off-roadway environment is an essential step before a significant number of highly automated vehicles can be deployed safely on actual roadways. Working with the Michigan Department of Transportation, U-M researchers have designed Mcity, a unique test facility for evaluating the capabilities of connected and automated vehicles and systems.”   [From University of Michigan Website]

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Connected safety

Nowadays the V2X technology is found in the position of entering into the phase of the early adopters, however the interest to this innovation is rising. Indeed, it opens the possibility of reducing drastically the number of the car accidents, resulting in money saving for the stakeholders involved, such as the automotive companies, car owners, the policy makers and insurance companies. Notwithstanding all the advantages, it introduces also relevant ethical problems, causing the need for an ad hoc regularization.

Every year more than 30,000 people die on US roads, according to the National Highways Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and traffic crashes weigh on the economy for an astounding $299.5 billion each year. The same agency states that run-off-road collisions, while being just the 20% of all the crashes, account for almost 40% of the total fatalities; the worst part of it is that almost half of these collisions are caused by simple distraction, a very big issue for road safety especially for driving teens. Nowadays, V2X technology seems to offer the right solution to reduce this and other types of car accidents, such as vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions.

The V2X technology is mainly based on DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communication) exploiting various types of solutions, for instance the wireless connected devices or sensor-based sign recognition, in order to allow the communication of vehicles with both other vehicles and infrastructures. Thus, the embedded software inside a car could be able to individuate the position of neighbor vehicles and to produce a signal in case of danger, but not only: by tracking the trajectory of other cars, it is also able to individuate the direction of the road, preventing the user from running off it. The latter application would be severely improved by equipping highways and related infrastructure with the same DSRC technology, permitting the vehicle to collect direct real-time information about the route, including path, road construction sites and road state (icy, wet, etc.).

For instance, a recent trial performed by Siemens on Germany’s A9 highway showed an astonishing 35% accident reduction thanks to V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) connection.  Such an impressive result can bring disruptive consequences for the insurance companies that would initially benefit from the overall decrease of the accident refunds; though, revenues from partially (or totally) automated vehicles would drop due to decreased insurance premiums, since they are more safe. Eventually, once the majority of the market will be equiped with V2I, the earnings of insurance companies would be drastically reduced, and the only way for them to survive could be a change in the business model. Solid firm like State Farm are thinking about reinventing themselves as “life management companies”: a combined insurance policy for all the aspects of everyone’s life (car, house, injuries, etc.) would allow the company to collect a huge amount of data about each client and thus to propose the fittest package possible, also giving advises to improve insured’s life and reducing its risks.

Effort of Siemens for V2X technology.

Another issue about insurances rises as soon as the connected vehicle is capable and allowed to correct driver’s mistakes or even to take an almost complete control, as in the driverless car. In this case, the responsibility should be shared between the owner and the producers of the vehicle (constructors and embedded software developers), thus a partial payment of the premiums by the manufactures seems to be a reasonable conclusion. Though, this does not exhaust the matter, since the ethical problems about crashes causing fatalities or injuries would probably open a major controversy about liability.

In conclusion, there are all the premises for the V2X technology to bring an overall improvement for car drivers, concerning both safety and fixed costs, together with the usual ethical issues that new technologies present to society.

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Enabling technologies in connected vehicles

Enabling technologies are inventions or innovations that can be applied to drive radical change in the capabilities of a user or culture. Speaking of connected vehicles, crucial enabling technologies are:

Internet of Things

The idea itself of connected vehicles recalls the concept of IoT, since it implies a communication between vehicles and other entities. This kind of interaction is broadly referred to as V2X, i.e. Vehicle-To-Everything. IoT, in turn, relies upon data generation and transmission.

Networks

Due to safety concerns, communication between vehicles must happen in real-time, thus making speed a key requirement. The main communication protocols object of interest are the DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) and the LTE V2X. The first one has been assigned the same frequency band (5.9 GHz) both in Europe and in the USA, so that the same devices can be used wherever. In the future LTE will extend the vehicle reach, i.e. its capability to interact with other devices up to 500 m away.

Sensors and actuators

Smaller and smaller sensors provide more information from the surrounding environment and eventually allow to take decisions on more solid grounds and to actively modify the vehicle behavior thanks to smart actuators.

Technology for storing and organizing big data

V2X, due to multiple connections (e.g. Vehicle-To-Vehicle, Vehicle-To-Infrastructure, Vehicle-To-Device, etc.), obviously generates remarkable volumes of data. These data must be stored in a structured way before being processed. Depending on the application, data crunching may take place on the vehicle ECU or on external servers, i.e. cloud computing.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is used to describe data acquisition or distribution through the Internet and wireless networks. Beyond technological advantages, its utilization provides cost savings. In fact, with fewer expensive data storage elements in the vehicle, the cost of our increasingly computerized cars might decrease.

Machine Learning

Thanks to the acquisition of real-time data from the various sensors, the system is continually learning and improving upon itself, increasing reliability, safety and performance. The goal is to gather “experience” in order to come up with a truly autonomous vehicle.