Love it or hate it—and we know many of you hate it—the connected car isn't going away. That much was evident at this year's Connected Car Expo, held in Los Angeles last week just ahead of the LA Auto Show. But "connected car" means more than just one thing, and not all of it is frivolous or just meant to reduce the minor inconveniences in our lives.
Car companies are in a hurry to squeeze the Internet and large displays into new cars. The OEMs are faced with a challenge; unlike a couple of decades ago, there aren't really any bad cars. Reliability and safety have made such strides that car makers are looking at digital bells and whistles as a way to differentiate their products from competitors, spurred on by focus groups demanding "the smartphone experience" while behind the wheel.
The technology being driven by the smartphone industry means that embedded processors and wireless modems are cheap and rugged enough to survive life in automotive applications. Consequently, engineers and programmers are constantly working on new ideas that leverage those processors and network connections to teach old cars new tricks. Done right, this could have big advantages for safety as well as personal convenience, but only if we—the general public—both know about it and can be convinced it's safe. Some of it might even be appealing to you.
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