THE INNOVATIONS TR ANSFORMING OUR DRIVING WO RLD
THE NEW SOFTWARE INVASION
Some car makers are pushing back against external software creeping into their cars. Others embrace the trend. Who’s right?
IN DETAIL
There’s a battle being waged across the car industry over who provides the software powering the infotainment. Car makers are taking sides – some embracing partner-ships with tech companies, others doing more themselves.
Volvo, for example, is proud to point out that its info-tainment system is Google’s Automotive OS with very lit-tle modification. Ferrari with its Purosangue, meanwhile, doesn’t have in-house navigation at all. Enrico Galliera, Ferrari’s chief commercial officer, said at the car’s launch: ‘We don’t have the resources to offer the same level of cy-ber security as some OEMs – it’s not enough to satisfy our clients, so there is no navigation in this car. Instead, we’ve fitted wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.’
Other major car makers including General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, however, are bristling against the idea they must buy in so much of this technology, with the main battle lines being drawn around infotainment and smartphone mirroring capabilities via Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Some car makers are bending over backwards to lock you into their proprietary tech, rather than relying on those digital giants. Markus Schäfer, chief tech officer at Mercedes-Benz, says: ‘Keeping people in our ecosystem means we can combine infotainment, ADAS [advanced driver-assistance systems] and body functions of the car.’ He believes ‘the car should have an advantage over the smartphone.’
It’s the same at BMW. ‘We can put a better experience and better functionality into our displays because we know them,’ says Stephan Durach, BMW’s senior VP for connected company development; ‘those using CarPlay in an EV, for example, can’t use the eRoute function [opti-mised route guidance for EVs] through CarPlay so they use our navigation instead. It’s a customer’s choice, obvi-ously, but for us it’s a competition to offer the best product we can – and we’ll see people moving away from using things like CarPlay.’ GM has announced it’s removing An-droid and CarPlay connectivity.
Confidence that car manufacturers can win the secret war is growing, then. But those auto makers are going up against tech giants that are some of the biggest companies in the world. And one of those tech firms, Harman (owned by Korean tech giant Samsung, it’s best known for its Harman/Kardon audio systems) has cottoned on to the shifting attitude of the automotive industry earlier than most. Its Ignite Store is a digital app store designed to give car makers a platform for trusted apps like Spotify, Tri-padvisor and What3Words on its own infotainment sys-tem. It may still be seen as an o
