The connected car arrives

Automobile research has become so advanced that today's cars are in substance computers with wheels. So why aren't we using them to surf the Web, communicate with other cars or order food at nearby restaurants?

We're then on our way. Current models of several cars, including the Ford Edge, the Audi A6 and the Lincoln MKX, can all connect to the Internet over Wi-Fi or 3G networks. These connections bring streaming audio and video, Twitter feeds, spoken text messages and current traffic information into the vehicle.

The beginning

And that's just the beginning. In the nearly future, you'll be able to browse the Web and get Facebook updates on your in-car navigation screen. And in coming years, wireless standards just as dedicated short-range communications will help cars connect to one another and to the road infrastructure, communicating real-time road conditions and other helpful information.

Ford is among the automakers leading the connected-car charge. Take, to illustrate, the Ford Edge. The 2011 and 2012 models of the souped-up crossover let you create your own in-car hotspot: Just plug your own mobile broadband modem or smartphone into one of the two USB ports, at the time share the connection with all your passengers over Wi-Fi.

The company's Sync platform

And the company's Sync platform, built by Microsoft, provides a range of connected features including voice-controlled navigation with turn-by-turn directions, 4-1-1 business search and personalized traffic alerts. You can as well plug in a music player via USB or pair a phone to the car via Bluetooth, at the time use voice commands to play music over the car's stereo system, make a call or have your text messages read aloud to you -- no headset required.

The Edge and other vehicles, just as the Lincoln MKX, have built-in touch displays that work much like a tablet or smartphone. Now used primarily for navigation and in-car controls, such displays will offer Web browsing in the straightway few years in many makes and models, according to George Peterson, the president of Detroit-based market innovation and consulting firm AutoPacific.

The then few years

In the then few years, nearly all new cars will offer built-in browsing and other Net-connected apps, says Peterson. In the meantime, he says, Ford's strategy is to use smartphones as the primary interface. About a dozen Ford cars, SUVs and trucks now support the company's Sync AppLink research, which lets you control certain Android, iOS or BlackBerry apps using voice commands or, in some models, the touch panel or buttons on the steering wheel.

Current AppLink-enabled apps include Pandora streaming music, Stitcher Internet radio, the iHeartRadio music player and OpenBeak, a Twitter app. All four have been optimized for voice control, and OpenBeak can read tweets aloud so your eyes stay on the road.

Several other automakers have followed Ford's lead, offering voice-enabled smartphone app integration with select 2012 models. Examples include Buick IntelliLink, BMW ConnectedDrive, Cadillac Cue, Chevrolet MyLink, Mini Connected and Toyota Entune. Toyota's Entune service, available with the 2012 Prius V, Camry and Tacoma, currently offers the most apps, with Bing search, iHeartRadio, Movietickets.com, OpenTable, Pandora and various data services including stock price updates, traffic reports and weather forecasts.

World of possibility

In-car wireless connections will open up a world of possibility, says K. Venkatesh Prasad, the group and technical leader of Infotronics Technology and Advanced Engineering at Ford. For instance, you might hear a recipe on the radio in your car, speak a few commands to look up the recipe on the Internet, and transmit the Web page to your own email address so that it's waiting for you on your PC when you get home.

This type of app might at first run on a smartphone, Prasad explains, but in the end cloud-based applications will run on your car in the same way they do on your computer or your smartphone today, as demonstrated by the recently unveiled Ford Evos concept car. The information that appears on the car's touchscreen is gathered and processed remotely by cloud apps.

The book-buying experience to work online

Just as years ago Amazon tweaked the book-buying experience to work online, giving e-commerce a tremendous kick-start, Prasad says, cloud-based apps need to be tuned for driving. Apps that are customized for hands-free driving, for instance, could reduce distraction issues during helping people remain productive during they're on the road. "We need to get the Internet tuned to road speed," he adds.

OnStar, General Motors' in-car telematics unit, is as well developing some interesting car-connection options. Many GM cars are equipped with OnStar's Stolen Vehicle Slowdown innovation, which gives law enforcement officers the ability to remotely stop a vehicle that's been reported stolen. The police send the vehicle information number to OnStar, which at that time sends a wireless signal to the car that causes the accelerator to stop working.

A future scenario could involve taking control of a stolen car's steering to guide it to the side of the road, says Nick Pudar, a business development vice president at OnStar.

The companies are as well working on giving GM owners remote access to the car's data, Pudar says. You might use your computer or smartphone to look up your miles-per-gallon rating over specific routes over a period of time, and maybe adjust your plans for maximum MPG. OnStar might as well suggest traffic routes based on your driving habits.

Some information about routes, MPG and traffic is already available to Chevy Volt drivers through the MyVolt.com portal. You can as well connect to electric cars just as the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf via a smartphone app even when you are nowhere nearly the vehicle.

The straightway major leap will come when cars can communicate directly with one another. At first, most car-to-car communication technologies will be aimed at curbing the number of accidents and resulting injuries and deaths in cars, according to Paul Laurenza, managing partner in the Washington office of the law firm Dykema, who works indirectly with the Department of Transportation on automotive legal issues. The DOT estimates that more than 80% of crashes could be prevented by using vehicle-to-vehicle safety measures, he says.

A similar innovation that's already in place in cars like the BMW 5 Series is designed to prepare the brakes for fast stopping and to enhance traction control and stability, says AutoPacific's Peterson, nevertheless it is based on sensors in the car, not a connection to other cars. The then and there step is to get cars with such sensors to transmit the data to each other -- something BMW, Daimler and other carmakers are beginning to test in Europe.

VW's Lee provides another interesting scenario for interconnectedness between cars: The company is conducting ongoing innovation on innovation that could enable cars to transmit route information to one another in real time. With such a system, a driver might send out his travel route to a cloud-based service for owners of supported VW cars. Friends who tap into the service could see where the driver is heading and adjust their own routes to meet him.

This crowdsourcing for travel might even get you discounts at restaurants, gas stations and hotels. If, for instance, business owners in a certain town knew a group of travelers would be arriving while a slow sales period or late at night, they might be willing to offer deals.

Fully connected scenario

"In a fully connected scenario, it is not just that your car is connected [to the Internet], however your car is connected to other cars, to your mobile phone, and to your home computer," says Lee. "Your car becomes an assistant and a companion to your digital life."

The then step afterwards vehicle-to-vehicle transmissions is for cars to connect to sensors on or nearly the road, to stoplights at intersections, and even to facilities just as parking lots to help you find a parking spot at the mall. Some of this communication already occurs -- to illustrate, some emergency vehicles can communicate with stoplights to make sure the lights have turned green or turn on a blinking red light for cross traffic.

As with car-to-car communications, many of the car-to-infrastructure connections will help make driving safer and will use the DSRC spectrum, says Mikael Gustavsson, the Connectivity Hub Leader at Volvo in charge of in-car connections. For instance, your car could tap into the DSRC network and let you know what's up around the then block -- say, that there is an accident and that you should slow down or find an alternate route.

These infrastructure signals could theoretically work in conjunction with sensors that are already in cars. Today, many of the most advanced cars -- just as the Volvo S60, the Audi A8, the Infiniti M37X and the Ford Edge -- have complex sensor networks that can scan in front of the car, control brakes and steering, and even nudge the vehicle back into a lane automatically. If communications capabilities were added to those sensors, a vehicle that senses an icy road might transmit that information not only to nearby cars, however also to a roadside terminal and even beyond that to several other endpoints that in turn transmit the warning to other drivers.

Phil Ames, a senior staff engineer at Intel who works on embedded wireless communications, envisions a future in which car and infrastructure sensors track and communicate everything that's going on, including whether the driver is paying attention. So, to illustrate, a road sign might send out a wireless signal warning about the prevalence of deer in the area. The car's sensors would receive the signal and go on high alert for a deer jumping out in front of the car, simultaneously preparing the car for sudden braking and audibly warning the driver of the danger.

But car-to-infrastructure communications won't necessarily stop with roadside signs and sensors. In the then and there few years, cars will be capable of connecting in a much more robust way to their surroundings, including local businesses. Ford's Prasad calls this the "last inch" problem, which has to do with the location-based information fed to a driver and how that information is displayed. It's one thing to have the wireless connections available, nevertheless it's another to use the connections to make driving easier and more worthwhile.

Volvo's Gustavsson says the company is working with mobile telecommunications vendor Ericsson on a possible scenario where cars can transmit diagnostic data and other information about a vehicle's health to service stations in certain urban areas. The idea is that you would pay a monthly fee to a repair shop or gas station to constantly monitor your vehicle. You would get notices about real-time service needs or even, say, an alert that you should buy gas now because the then station is too far away.

The connected car will open up new money-making opportunities for car makers and their partners -- including developers of in-car apps and makers of dashboard interface systems, as then as hotels, gas stations and other businesses that cater to travelers. Even the new safety features will boost earnings from car sales, since drivers will pay extra for vehicles that protect them from crashes. Peterson notes that according to AutoPacific's driver surveys, approximately one-third of people who buy Ford cars today do so because of the technical features just as Internet connectivity.

However, as with any wireless connection, there are as well concerns about connected car safety and security. Researchers have proven that Bluetooth, cellular networks and other entry points into your car's systems are vulnerable to determined hackers. There's as well the more basic problem of distracted driving -- as drivers deal with more and more onscreen data and feeds, will they be less aware of, and slower to respond to, what's happening outside their cars?

Another hurdle is integration. Any IT professional who has deployed a complex ERP system or has tried to link communications tools from different vendors knows that integration is one of computing's greatest challenges. When the computer has four wheels and speeds along at 70 mph, the challenges are even greater.

But having manufacturers police themselves on safety has at times led to problems. Peterson cites BMW's early-2000s iDrive system for controlling the car's climate, audio, navigation and more as an illustration of too-complicated research that drew drivers' attention away from the road. "Designed by engineers for engineers, the system was practically impossible to decipher," he says, adding that it's up to manufacturers and designers to "anyway you look at it understand what the distractions are and make sure their vehicles minimize the distraction. The key is ease of use."

As for data security and integration, the DSRC network is being designed with both issues in mind. The DOT's plan is to have all vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications transmitted over the closed network, which will keep cars' data sequestered from the Internet and provide a single communications platform for car makers to work with. According to attorney Laurenza, recent DOT policy papers point to a DSRC certification process for all sensors and wireless connections in a car.

However, the DSRC network is however a work in progress. Part of the challenge, according to Peterson, is getting all of the car companies to agree on standard protocols, not to mention specifically what to communicate over the network. No car companies have but announced vehicles that will work with DSRC, however they say they're making progress.

The research

"We are actively developing the research and working with our government and automaker partners globally to help deliver it as quickly and affordably possible," says Ford spokesperson Wes Sherwood.

GM is taking a somewhat different approach. To put it more exactly than building the research into the car itself, the company is developing portable devices and smartphone apps that make use of DSRC. The company, which recently demonstrated such a device, says this approach will make DSRC communications available to a greater range of drivers.

But the integration woes don't end with the communications network. Another headache has to do with protecting proprietary information, just as the data gathered by a car's sensors. As Volvo's Gustavsson notes, it's one thing to work with a third party when it comes to interactive maps or streaming Twitter feeds, nevertheless something else absolutely when a partner's app taps into, say, the actual brake sensor on a car.

Attorney Laurenza points out that the new innovation might raise concerns about liability. Citing his before example about cars communicating with one another to avoid collisions, he wonders who would be liable if a car transmitted faulty information to another car and someone was killed as a result. For instance, a car might send the wrong signal, or a sensor on the road could communicate the wrong information, or data might become corrupted while transmission.

"There could be a question, if a legal issue arose, about who owns the data that goes out over the network," says Laurenza. "In other words an issue the DOT is looking at. There are systems linked to the car manufacturers as then, and who gains access depends on how the data is transmitted."

Insurance companies, for instance, might be very interested in knowing where and when their clients drive, how fast, how many close calls they have, in short on. "An insurance company might set more accurate premiums based on the innovation in the car," he says.

Laurenza says that the privacy issues are not as critical as other legal concerns, because the data transmitted is anonymized by the automaker and does not relate directly to the individual driver. However Senators Al Franken and Chris Coons, among others, have expressed doubt over the effectiveness of data anonymization innovation, citing "a broad body of innovation showing that it is extraordinarily difficult to successfully anonymize highly personal data like location."

John Brandon is a former IT manager at a Fortune 100 company who now writes about innovation. He has written more than 2,500 articles in the past 10 years. Follow him on Twitter (@jmbrandonbb.