The humble car is currently undergoing something of a revolution. Cars are getting smarter, through on-board technology and remote connectivity, and soon they’re expected to drive themselves. It’s exciting stuff – but for fans of David Hasselhoff and 1980s TV shows, it’s nothing new.
The four-wheeled star of Knight Rider, a custom Pontiac Trans Am called KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) demonstrated many capabilities that are only being realised in the real-world now, a good thirty years later.
Smart Telematics
Back in the 80s, KITT had an impressive reaction time of a nanosecond, enabled by his “1,000 megabit” memory capacity. Today’s smart cars might not yet be able to take autonomous decisions, but they are certainly very intelligent, thanks to on-board SIM cards which allow driving data to be relayed back to the car manufacturer, as well as providing real-time feedback to the driver.
Voice Recognition
KITT was able to hold detailed, intelligent conversations with his driver. We’re not quite at that stage, but today’s connected cars can understand voice commands and help drivers to keep their focus on the road. The technology that supports this uses 4G connectivity to send voice transmissions back to cloud computing systems which process the speech, figure out an appropriate response and react accordingly.
Anti-sleep Measures
Whilst I’m sure there is a connected car that could shout “Michael, wake-up!” if you start to nod off, audio alerts in modern safety systems have gone a slightly different way. Cameras embedded into the car can monitor the driver’s attention levels by tracking eye movements and where the driver is looking. If the camera detects that the driver’s eyes have strayed from the road, or closed entirely, it can then trigger an audio alert to wake them up.
Emergency Response
Hopefully this is one element of connected car technology you won’t have to experience first-hand. In the event of an accident, sensors in the car can determine the severity of the crash and (if necessary) automatically alert the emergency services, providing your location, speeding up response times and potentially saving lives. The EU’s eCall initiative is a great example.
These areas are really just the start – there are many more M2M applications emerging in new cars all the time. But to achieve the ultimate dream of driverless cars, we also need to see a whole range of connected vehicles, roads, buildings and other infrastructure introduced.
So perhaps Knight Rider wasn’t so far-fetched after all. Now we just need that Turbo Boost…
Written by: Bernd Eckenfels, M2M segment marketing manager, Gemalto