Car manufacturers including Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Ford are breaking ground in connected options for their automobiles. BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, expects 94 million connected cars to ship in 2021, and for 82% of all cars shipped in that year to be connected.
We’ve all heard of ‘the connected car’… but how does a car actually make the connection?
There are many ways a connected car can ‘connect’ with drivers, homes and services. Primary avenues include embedded, tethering and app integration. Embedded options allow for connectivity through various wireless protocols including WiFi, bluetooth and more, while tethered connections use a hard wire or charging cable to integrate a users smartphone for connectivity and information display.
The other interesting avenue (something Metova developers specialize in) is through a 3rd party app that is integrated in to a vehicle… think Google Maps, or even a music service integrated directly in your vehicles connected display (Tesla was a pioneer in this space with their offering of the Slacker Radio app in their cars). In the near future your favorite smartphone app could make the jump to your car’s display – with or without the assistance of your smartphone – providing updates on news, friends, travel alerts, controlling your home automation and much, much more.