The importance of the growing smart home market is drawing in car manufacturers and their development strategies. Mercedes, BMW, Ford and others are all bringing Amazon Alexa and other smart home voice control platforms into their connected cars. But, voice control is just the start. According to ABI Research, by 2022, more than 500 million connected cars will have shipped and the ability to tie those vehicles into the platforms controlling more than 300 million smart homes around the world is driving investment and partnerships amid the vendors and technology suppliers across both markets.
“Extending smart home voice control into the connected vehicle is part of an ongoing integration that will pull together home and vehicle personalization. It makes a weakening of Original Equipment Manufacturers’ (OEMs) total control over the technologies embedded into their vehicles, “ says Jonathan Collins, Research Director at ABI Research. “That means OEMs will have to select partnerships and technology suppliers that can best support the widest integrations.”
However, the smart home market remains a wild-west style market with a variety of vendors, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and others building fiefdoms with industry-wide standards remaining minimal. This leaves vehicle OEM manufacturer faced with conflicting options for technologies and smart home partnerships to maximize the appeal of their connected car strategies. “With the looming potential of autonomous vehicles, OEMs are faced with an array of potential partners to help support that generation of vehicles that increasingly threaten the OEMS sole role in controlling the functionality and appeal of their vehicles,” says Collins.
Prime Base Incorporated has been implementing these new WiFi-4G technologies in the Automotive Smart Car Devices being manufactured for implementation with Verizon and AT&T wireless networks across the globe with their OEM partnerships for providing “best of the best” overall connectivity solutions for today’s rapidly expanding smart home – smart car market segments.