Big Tech, Carmakers on Collision Course to Own the Customer: Panelists

The push of big tech companies into the automotive space will create a customer ownership conflict, said participants on an Xperi connected car webinar last week. “Is someone a supplier to Ford, or is someone ultimately competing with Ford for ownership of the customer?” said Jeff Jury, general manager, Xperi’s Connected Car unit. “Whose product is it?”

Google and Apple want their Android and iOS operating systems to extend into the vehicle, while a car company doesn’t want to lose the connection it has with its customers, Jury said. “Ultimately, you have to decide, is it a Ford vehicle with an Android or Google OS, or is it a Google OS in a Ford vehicle?” It comes down to “who owns the customer,” he said. Big tech’s strategy is to own the customer across multiple devices, “and that may be something the car industry has to look at,” Jury said. Automakers don’t want to be “disaggregated” from their consumers, he said.

From the ownership and economic sides, tech companies and automotive OEMs are “fighting for market at the end of the day,” said Manuel Pereira, business development manager, Visteon, “so effectively, yes, Google would be competing with Ford.” That’s a new concept in automotive, Pereira said: “It wouldn’t have been that way in the past.”

User experience is playing a greater role in today’s vehicles, said Visteon’s Pereira. A discussion among OEMs today is, “Should you pay more attention to user experience when you’re inside the car or to your transmission and suspension when you are actually driving the car?” he said. “Because what sells a car?” he said, referencing driving dynamics, or “the infotainment experience that you get when you sit in a car.”

Safety is the priority, said Pereira, noting the driver is the center of Visteon’s attention and its top concern when engineers think about use cases and technology in the vehicle. How technology will affect the car’s driving function and how technologies and interfaces can be made more convenient are key, he said. That has to be balanced with the passengers’ enjoyment and their ability to connect to the internet, he said.

When car shopping, consumers place less emphasis today on whether it has rustproofing, the transmission works or the tires’ performance “because the quality is very good,” said Jury. Their priorities instead are on how easy it is to connect a phone via Bluetooth or how many menus they have to go through to adjust the air conditioning. All the infotainment features consumers have access to present a “new risk and opportunity for everyone involved, which is, how do you make it more seamless for everyone?” he said.

Most driver monitoring applications today are still stand-alone systems, Pereira said. If systems were integrated, sensor information could warn the driver when she is too distracted -- tinkering with the infotainment interface, for example, he said. Integrating sensor data with the audio system could help keep the focus on driver safety, he said.

Xperi’s DTS AutoSense, which monitors a cabin for safety issues, and AutoStage, geared to entertainment, work together, Jury said. “The more immersive you make an entertainment experience, the more you have to worry about safety; the two have to be tied together,” he said. “You can’t just drop a standalone system into vehicles nowadays," he said: “Everything has to be integrated.”

The fast pace of technology advancement has changed design cycles, Jury noted. “The spec may evolve,” he said, “and you may be developing … new innovations for a state-of the-art implementation that weren’t envisioned when you first started the project.” Today, it’s “almost virtually impossible for you to specify ahead of time,” Pereira added, saying an OEM creates reference designs along the way that it can use for future vehicles. “It’s not a black-and-white specification when you start.”

Companies have to think ahead about what an infotainment system is going to look like "not necessarily just 18 months from now but maybe four or five years from now,” Jury said. “That’s new thinking; that’s not how things were developed 20 years ago.”

Though listening to music from a smartphone over Bluetooth is slowly gaining traction in the car, Visteon has very few designs that have deleted the car radio altogether, Pereira said. For now, the car radio isn’t going away, he said. Visteon data shows people use their time in the car to listen to radio broadcasts and news that they don’t listen to at home. “We don’t see a major trend where one will take over the other,” he said of Bluetooth connectivity to a smartphone and terrestrial radio.

Commenting on the timetable for autonomous vehicles (AV), Jury estimated 25 years, starting regionally and with long-haul trucks. For consumers, he predicted at least four car generations away, but said that’s “aggressive.” It’s attainable, particularly for highway driving, Jury said, but not on the “immediate horizon.” Pereira wouldn’t stamp a time frame. “The real challenge of autonomous driving does not reside on technology,” he said, because automotive technology today is “fully capable” of driverless vehicles.

The arrival of the autonomous era has more to do with “the coexistence of autonomous cars … and human-driven cars,” Pereira said. The transition will happen by geographies where the benefits can be maximized by cars communicating with each other and likely in the centers of highly populated cities, he said. Pereira envisioned an AV coexisting with city buses in a “self-contained environment” but tempered expectations, saying, “I don’t think it will happen everywhere in all cases.”