App-connected vehicles to total 20% of consumer cars in Western Europe and North America in five years
A combination of new standards for vehicle to smartphone communication plus the increase in smart device ownership is spurring adoption of application-connected vehicles, according to new research.
Advancements in entertainment head-units (the hardware user interfaces in cars for control of vehicle infotainment) and higher smartphone penetration will result in app capability reaching a fifth of all consumer vehicles in the developed markets of North America and Western Europe by 2017, said Juniper Research.
The success of new standards such as MirrorLink, developed by the Car Connectivity Consortium to provides seamless connectivity between a smartphone and a vehicle's infotainment system, will be instrumental in creating the foundations for the connected car ecosystem to flourish, the report stated.
Though Juniper Research also forecasts robust growth in more traditional embedded consumer telematics services, the success of smartphone tethering and in-vehicle apps is expected to exert downward pressure on the price of vehicle manufacturers' own embedded telematics infotainment services.
The report notes that Big Data derived from telematics service provision is also likely to emerge as an unexpected revenue driver for telematics companies and automotive manufacturers.
'Sky-high smartphone ownership and a standardised approach to integrating apps into the vehicle head-unit mean that the barriers to making the connected car a reality have all but gone,' said the report's authorn Anthony Cox.
The report notes that the only factor holding back even faster deployment of in-vehicle internet will be slow growth in the new vehicle market itself in developed economies.
Trials of V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) are on-going in some markets, although wide-spread deployment remains a long way off, Juniper added.
