Automakers have had a difficult time making their “smartphones on wheels” actually work like smartphones. All you need to do is look at a J.D. Power survey to confirm that most infotainment interfaces continue to frustrate car owners.
That’s a primary reason most automakers have embraced Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto to supplement their own often-kludgy infotainment interfaces. But this means automakers give up valuable branding in the dashboard display. More significantly, with CarPlay and Android Auto, car companies are forced to hand over valuable data that’s potentially the most lucrative aspect of connected cars.
In response, we’re starting to see cloud-based infotainment solutions from automotive suppliers aimed at taking on the Apple and Google platforms. With its purchase of a start-up called OpenCar this week, prominent traffic- and parking-data provider Inrix has positioned itself to provide car owners with more choices and automakers with a different option—and the ability to control their own car data.
“Inrix has been known for delivering dynamic data to the car, and we’ve relied on others to figure out what happens once it gets into the car,” Steve Banfield, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me. “Today those platforms are proprietary and limited to one OEM. We decided to work on that problem and leverage the OpenCar platform as a jumping off point.”
A More Open Platform
What OpenCar brings to the table is a more open platform for automakers and third-party developers. “OpenCar has a framework and environment that can be built once and employed in multiple OEMs and in multiple models,” Banfield said. “On the backend, OEMs have complete control, with over-the-air updates.”
Banfield noted that Inrix has “gotten a lot of feedback from our OEM partners that they’re anxious to have an alternative to CarPlay and Android Auto. They want to make the decisions on how the data is coming from the car and what is happening with their customers. They don’t want that to be sucked into some server that belongs to someone else, where they have no control at all.”
In conjunction with the announcement of the OpenCar acquisition, Inrix also unveiled a new product called Autotelligent that the company says “automatically creates a daily, personalized itinerary of anticipated trips by accessing the user’s calendar and contacts.”
“It creates a mobility assistant that lives in the cloud that can be deployed across mobile apps and car head units,” Banfield added. “It can learn a driver’s habits, their interests, where they go, the places they stop along the way and can use that to predict the information they need to travel and move around the world more safely and efficiently.”
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Individual automakers, including Ford and General Motors, have tried to engage third-party developers to create similar platforms. “The problem with that is that no single automaker has a big enough base from which they can entice the breadth of application and service providers,” said Banfield, “especially when each platform isn’t built on common standards.”
Inrix said OpenCar’s application ecosystem “includes roughly 1,300 registered developers” and “covers accommodations, city guides, fuel, Internet radio, parking, reviews and more.” OpenCar is also a member of the Genivi Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, so it has access to an even larger pool of developers.
Inrix isn’t the only one working on such a solution; at CES this year, Bosch showed a similar platform called MySpin. “We think we’ve created a unique experience and a unique value proposition with the breadth we’ll bring to the table,” Banfield said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me to see other people entering the space, given the need for more and more cars to be connected and a much more compelling user experience.
