Business

Tech giants battle for control of the car at CES

Google, Apple and Microsoft and others are fighting to be in control of the vehicle’s “operating system”.

Afp January 10, 2014

Conference attendees take photographs of the Audi Sport Quattro laserlight concept car, featuring laser headlights, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada January 9, 2014. REUTERS

LAS VEGAS:

As the car becomes a connected Internet device, the titans of the tech sector are battling for control of the wheel.

The war is shaping up a lot like the computer sector, with Google, Apple and Microsoft and others fighting to be in control of the vehicle’s “operating system” to deliver apps, navigation and other services.

Some of those battles were played out this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which included a record nine auto manufacturers and scores of equipment makers, including software and related tech companies.

“People want consumer apps in their cars, they want to connect to their smartphones, they want to connect to the cloud,” says Grant Courville, director of product management at QNX, which makes the on-board systems used on tens of millions of cars.

But the battlefield is wide open because “there’s no clear dominant app ecosystem in automotive,” Courville said from the CES floor.

At CES, Canadian-based QNX unveiled a partnership with Qualcomm to support the chipmaker’s new automotive platform, which connects to smartphones and offers apps for maps, speech recognition, geolocation, and vehicle analytics.

At the same time, Google unveiled a partnership with General Motors, Audi, Honda and Hyundai in a new partnership to bring the Android mobile system to vehicles in a new Open Automotive Alliance.

The moves come with Microsoft in a longstanding partnership with Ford, and Apple widely expected to expand its system for connecting the iPhone with automotive electronics systems.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 11^th, 2014.

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COMMENTS (1)

Haroon Rashid | 10 years ago | Reply Alliances on auto industry on Operating Systems are encouraging. The few names of companies aren't reflective of industry. What about the rest. in my opinion OICA Intl.Car Manufacturers Association to rate/accredit OS platform available thru OICA. Auto companids from Asia, Mid-East, China, India-Pakistan sub-continent. Japanese NTT Docomo is recent. Nokia Finland a longtime pRticipant @ Geneva ITU, Networked Car in March which should be invited by ITU to monitor the event. Google should support transparency, level plsying field.

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