Wooden touchscreens, augmented-reality goggles, 'floating' crystal displays, movie themes, hovering avatars and AI chatbots: all took a bow in the automotive zone at CES this year.
The tech show has grown to the point that it now offers one of the clearest gauges of what we can expect by way of tech in the next generation of cars.
This year, the message was 4K UHD clear: car makers see the cabin and its digital transformation as one of the biggest motoring battlegrounds going forward, despite the fact that delays in the move to autonomous cars means the driver won’t be able to enjoy all that’s on offer. In fact, the inescapable conclusion from the automotive side of CES was ‘RIP the dashboard button’.
“You will see even more screens in the car," Mercedes-Benz chief technology officer Markus Schäfer told Autocar at the event. The premium brand will roll out more cars with a seamless screen spanning the width of the dashboard, using gaming graphics to create a “stunning visualisation”, Schäfer promised.
The buzzphrase from the show from the automotive side was without a doubt ‘software-defined car’. Car makers are working alongside their key technology suppliers to overhaul the electronic architecture of future platforms to enable superchips from the likes of Qualcomm to power advanced software that will allow multiple updates to introduce new features on these ever-expanding screens.
The forecast is that many car customers won’t tolerate downgrades from their smartphone useability.
“People like my wife and daughters want mobility with a lot of bells and whistles to continue their digital experience,” said Jean-Marie Lapeyre, chief automotive technology and innovation officer at consultancy Capgemini. “They don't care about the size of the engine or how fast it can go; they just want it to go safely from place A to place B.”
In the far future, the car will probably drive there for them, but autonomy is being outpaced by digital cabin experience.
“Penetration of [autonomous cars] will be very slow, and it will not be affordable to a large audience,” said Christian Sobottka, president of Samsung-owned Harman Automotive, which describes itself as the world’s largest supplier of infotainment systems. “The desire of customers to have the car behave like all the other consumer electronics devices will push the in-cabin evolution much faster.”
Harman showed off an automotive grade version of OLED screen technology, called Neo QLED, that it says retains the sharpness but is cheaper and uses less power.
“Everybody has great television sets at home, and then you enter in your car and you have this greyish TFT display,” Sobottka said.
Add your comment