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Technology is Turning Our Cars Into Smartphones

As people become more wedded to mobile devices, the car industry is grappling to keep up with the latest gadgetry and hopes the technology isn’t obsolete soon after vehicles hit the showroom floor.

Behind the wheel of a 2015 Acura TLX, Danny Martin tells the car to shoot him a text message on his iPhone.

“Tell Danny Martin: ‘Isn’t there a lot of technologies in this car?’” he commands.

The voice behind the dashboard says it will. And within a couple of wireless seconds, the phone in Martin’s breast pocket alerts him to a new text that reads: “Isn’t there a lot of technologies in this car.”

Perfect, except Martin forgot to include “question mark” in his command.

Question marks are huge in the wondrous world of new-car technology, which aims to fill roadways with smartphones on wheels.

As people become more wedded to and dependent upon all that their mobile devices provide, the car industry is grappling to keep up with the latest gadgetry and hoping the technology isn’t obsolete soon after vehicles hit the showroom floor.

“How do you get a car to interface with the technology an individual buyer is used to?” asked Martin, a sales manager for Jay Wolfe Acura in south Kansas City. “That is the million-dollar question.”

It’s an especially large question for younger consumers, many of whom can’t fathom a time when placing a call on the road meant pulling up to a gas station and feeding dimes into a pay phone.

Finding the vehicle that syncs best with their on-the-go demands is important “especially to millennials” in their early 30s or younger “to the point it’s one of their main considerations in buying,” said Nicole Carriere of AutoTrader.com.

“With baby boomers, it’s not so much a make-or-break issue,” she said.

However, AutoTrader’s surveys do find older drivers catching up with the young in their appetite for what the industry calls “the connected car.”

“We definitely have to appeal to both markets,” GM spokesman Stefan Cross said. “Five or six years ago, vehicle technology was way down the list of features most important to car buyers — not even in the top 20. Now it’s in the top five of deciding factors.”

When deciding to pour tens of thousands of dollars into a new car, consumers young and old increasingly expect vehicles to connect seamlessly and hands-free with the swirling universe of telecommunications.

After all, if their $400 electronic tablets can relay flight information, flash news alerts and display real-time weather radar in Chicago, shouldn’t a $40,000 Buick do the same?

Certainly. But the challenge is making a Buick that smart for 10 or 15 years.

“Technology is always moving,” said Alexander Edwards, president of the market research firm Strategic Vision, based in San Diego. “If you were to go back to 1970, automakers were saying, ‘Yes, let’s put all our audio integration into eight-track tape players.’ …

“Anymore they have to keep asking, ‘What’s going to be the next big wave?’ I wouldn’t put a bet on any technology existing, as is, a decade from now.”

Recent advancements in the “connected car” include General Motors upgrading Wi-Fi hot spots to 4G in new vehicles, which allows occupants to operate as many as seven mobile devices at once, the company says.

Ford’s updatable SYNC AppLink feature soon will enable motorists in 7 million cars to press a button and, with a few spoken words, notify Domino’s Pizza to make a home delivery.

Experts foresee one out of four cars sold worldwide in 2020 having online networking abilities.

Meanwhile, automakers are cutting deals with software giants and mobile service providers to incorporate features that can be updated over time. The Chrysler Group partnered with Overland Park-based Sprint to introduce and provide upgrades for wireless “Uconnect Access” in the Dodge Viper and Ram 1500.

Recognizing the speed of change in the telecommunications market, many car manufacturers are moving away from built-in phoning systems, such as GM’s OnStar, and toward what the industry calls “brought-in” uses — adapting the car to devices you bring in.

The trick to “brought-in” connectivity is in perfecting an in-dash system that interfaces not only with today’s variety of smartphones but also with mobile gadgets to come.

And, Jay Wolfe’s Martin adds, a connected car has little value if the owners can’t figure out how to access everything with ease.

To help them along, the dealership assigns Martin to its team of “delivery specialists.” As at other area dealerships, gigabit geeks without direct sales duties step in after a vehicle is purchased just to tutor buyers on the electronic bells and whistles.

“It usually takes between 45 minutes and an hour,” Martin said.

Infotainment

The first generation of GPS navigation systems installed a dozen years ago are today as useful as the old videocassette player in your closet.

In the age of Netflix and Blu-ray, DVD players on the back of headrests have lost their cutting edge.

Knowing this, auto consumers tend to split into two categories.

Some will settle on stripped-down basics. They intend to hang on to a vehicle that lacks needless frills bound to be outdated by 2025.

Others will pay extra for a flashy “infotainment” console that connects them to the Web and their personal playlists, and if technologies veer in new directions, they’ll just trade in — to the delight of automakers.

As time passes, many of the no-frills motorists start coming around to the fancy side.

They’ll have been bothered too often by having to fumble for a ringing cellphone while driving. One fender bender and they’ll want their next car to alert them to motorists coming up on their blind side.

At first blush, “wanting your car to work as well as a smartphone makes about as much sense as wanting a phone to work like a car,” said Kansas City auto mechanic Gary Tannen. “It’s just one complication in a car that can go wrong.”

On the other hand, features once thought to be not so essential, such as power windows, are now readily accepted.

“Cruise control is a good example,” Tannen said. “Sure, it’s another thing that can break down. But when it’s working, it’s a pretty handy thing to have.”

In any event, cars can’t adopt the latest innovations overnight.

New car models cycle every four or five years, during which the popularity of mobile technology might switch from a basic cellphone to an Android device to the latest Apple.

For their part, companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are romancing automakers to sign on to in-car entertainment and information systems aimed at devotees of those brands.

For example, Apple this year announced the development of a system it calls CarPlay, which would integrate iPhone features and the voice of Siri, Apple’s soothing cyberspeaker, into car stereo systems without having to connect through a dock.

The auto world’s quest for up-to-date electronic relevance faces all kinds of obstacles and questions that haven’t been fully addressed, said market researcher Edwards:

Do carmakers want to control their own connectivity features or turn the job over to companies with the know-how but little interest in selling cars?

Would the cost of data services be charged monthly or worked into the sticker price?

What regulatory and safety issues do in-dash mobile technologies raise? Should states issue tickets to curb touch-screen use — some new Tesla models feature 17-inch screens — the way lawmakers seek to discourage texting while driving?

“All these questions make for a huge headache for the industry,” Edwards said.

Driver assistance

Chuck O’Brien is driving on Interstate 35 in rush hour and, for half a minute now, he hasn’t looked at the road.

A multitasker by nature, he will command his Mercedes S550 to make phone calls, display on his dash the latest headlines out of Iraq, order up a channel on Sirius radio or wirelessly pipe in Pandora. He will check e-mails on his iPhone 6 if he must.

O’Brien, 29, is of a generation that has come to expect the very latest at their fingertips. Which is a good thing as he shows off the S550 because he can do so without having to manually speed up, slow down or even keep his eyes fixed ahead.

It’s not everyone’s brand of driving, he said. But for O’Brien, who manages Mercedes-Benz sales at Aristocrat Motors in Merriam, the “Driver Assistance Package” when activated is the easiest and safest way to maneuver. Especially when traffic is thick.

“We could go around the I-435 loop infinitely,” he said, “without the driver touching a pedal.”

Self-driving features — billed as “driver assist,” “collision mitigation” or “pedestrian recognition” — are available today in a variety of higher-end makes and models. They rely on sensors and cameras to keep a vehicle from drifting out of its traffic lane. They adjust to the speed of a car moving a safe distance ahead and to the cars speeding from behind.

The system on O’Brien’s $119,000 vehicle can detect an object stopped in the roadway and will slam on the brakes if a driver manually accelerating fails to heed the alarms.

He asks: Care for a driver-assisted braking demonstration on busy Southwest Boulevard?

Not necessary, replies a nervous (and older) writer for The Star.

“Oh, I’m very comfortable,” said O’Brien with but a thumb on the wheel. “The car just knows” and can react quicker than drivers do.

Fully autonomous driving, where cars can be programmed to go places with no humans needed, is the connected car at its sci-fi ultimate, experts say.

If a future of cars driving on their own is to happen, they will need to communicate with one another — and to sensors along the roadway — via wireless technology, said Kevin Link, senior vice president of Verizon Telematics. The company provides data service to drivers of Mercedes, Volkswagen and Nissan vehicles.

“We’re not there yet … but we’ve got to get to autonomous driving,” he said. “We lose over 30,000 people a year in the U.S. to car crashes, and 90 percent are due to human error.”

“It’s hard for our generation to imagine” that driving is safer if done by computers, said Link, who is 52. “But my kids are going to expect it with their cars.”

©2014 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)