CES Day 3 Panel Discussion: Connecting with Confidence

author: Claire   

By 2020, 250 million cars worldwide will be connected to the internet. Consumers – especially young consumers – are demanding technology. To connect with confidence, automakers are responding with options, including the ability to upgrade and interface with the latest aftermarket technologies. 

Six experts from the auto tech industry and car service associations sat together on Day 3 of CES 2017, giving their perspectives in different angles on the current state of the connected car industry.

Aaron Schulenburg, Executive Director of Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) pointed out at the beginning of the panel that as cars are becoming more advanced in technology and features, the role of diagnosing accident and repair related failures in the systems become more complex. Drivers usually don't understand what those trouble codes mean, while most automakers are making long and detailed collision bulletins as a common rule.

"It's becoming important that collision repair market and other segments come together and look at solutions and find ways to A: demonstrate the need; B: to find reasonable solutions to how we gonna approach this."

"We have more and more features into our systems—to the point that many of our consumers sometimes have trouble understanding them, have trouble using them. Really we have to step back and say, are these features really at value? Is there a point to putting hundreds, even thousands of features into a vehicle?" said John Schneider, Chief Engineer of EESE Research and Advanced at Ford.

He further stressed that it was out of such doubt, Ford decided to divert its attention from designing features to more focus on user experience  Currently, Ford is working with companies to link homes and provide connectivity services to vehicles. It has announced a strategic partnership with Amazon, to connect Amazon's Echo to Ford cars in 2017.

Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer, moovel North America, LLC, from a different angle, talked about sharing economy trends. It's a future for urban mobility that all forms of transportation, from public transit to ridesharing and on-demand ride apps, break out of their silos and are organized into one well-connected experience, with public transit as the foundational core. The company is developing a product called RideTap, which makes servicing customers easier by finding the closest available transportation option during a particular moment.

While Dave Anderson, Director of Technology - Smart Machines at Samsung talks about the burgeoning of mobile devices in recent years and the information explosion era, and how all these could be connected with automobiles.

"Every hour, we're selling 44000 mobile phones, 5400 TVs, all these are connected devices…Samsung is doing a number of things to help out the automobile industry. We bought Harman international, which allows us to become a very important part of automotive industry. It certifies Samsung's commitment not only to the level of services from the data respective, but also from product perspective," said Anderson.

Claire

Claire Peng has over 6 years of professional experience in the media industry, covering TV, newspaper and online media. She was once a reporter and producer for Fairchild Television based in Toronto Canada, and worked as an English news reporter for the Global Times in Beijing. She writes mainly about self-driving, companies investment, and the enterprise lab.