BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Though Siri-ous, Automakers May Be Botching Infotainment

Following
This article is more than 10 years old.

It was no surprise: Apple determines that it wants to play in vehicle connectivity, and a passel of automakers immediately line up with Siri and her Silicon Valley pals. So Apple apparently will provide voice commands for at least a handful of car brands.

But while automotive OEMs seem content to have become traveling companions of the digital-communications industry, they already may have lost sight of exactly what their customers want from infotainment. In their zeal to allow drivers and passengers to tap into social networking and the cloud through vehicles, automakers may be overlooking the real point of in-vehicle connectivity, failing to optimize the true value of the technology -- and, in the process, forgoing opportunities to cement the brand loyalty of grateful owners.

At least that's what Thilo Koslowski believes, and he's one of the most influential analysts in the burgeoning connected-vehicle business. The vice president and automotive-practice leader for Gartner Research warns that "the auto industry must be careful not to fall victim to mobile-device hype. At the end of the day," he told me, "for them it's not so much the question of whether 'there's an app for that' as whether there should be an app for that. And I'm not sure they're recognizing that."

Specifically, new research by Gartner has found that when it comes to mobile applications in the vehicle, consumers are most interested in "specific applications that make sense when they're driving," he said at a telematics conference in Michigan last week, as reported by the Detroit Free Press. Real-time weather forecasts, map updates and information about parking availability were near the top of most consumers' lists of web-enabled information. And the top three consumer in-vehicle "wants," the newspaper said, are voice-recognition commands, built-in vehicle navigation systems and automated crash notification systems such as OnStar.

What weren't consumers so hot on in Gartner's research? Being able to tweet or use Facebook, Koslowski said.

"Some of our auto-manufacturer clients were surprised by that finding," Koslowski told me, even though Gartner research just about six months earlier had provided earlier hints of the same industry disconnect with consumers. "They had embarked on the idea of getting social networking into the car. But if they want to be successful with connected-vehicle features, they need to realize that consumers aren't ready for many of the things that manufacturers are thinking about putting into the car.

"The challenge for car markers is to find out what's useful and what's not. They're overestimating what consumers want. The danger is if they go too much in that direction they may leapfrog consumer demand." Connectivity, he said, shouldn't be "about recreating what we do in front of our laptop or desktop" computer.

In addition to making a low priority of social-networking capabilities in the car, Koslowski said, consumers are less interested in other non-driving-related applications such as local online search, web-enabled games and people tracking.

Instead, Koslowski advised, car makers should "focus on value propositions that enhance the customer's driving and ownership experiences." That could include partnering with network carriers and mobile-phone manufacturers to develop flexible data-access pricing models, enabling safe ways to consume content in the car and honing in on the "right" applications instead of "all applications.

But if consumers are less interested than carmakers might assume in conducting social networking while driving, how does Koslowski explain the fact that Americans don't seem to be able to help themselves from texting while driving?

"If you text," he answered, "you're reaching out to one person -- it's one-to-one communications. You can think about e-mail or a phone call in the same way. Those are usually things that are urgent and you can put into a specific context.

"But social networking is one-to-many, or many-to-one [communication], which usually isn't all that pressing. It doesn't lend itself to one-on-one communications."

Another problem with in-car connectivity so far, Koslowski said, is that "the systems are still clumsy and not intuitive and not seamless." Automakers haven't figured out "how do you serve up" content, he said.

For that reason, Koslowski believes, the arrival of Siri -- Apple's voice-enabled "intelligent personal assistant" and knowledge navigator -- will be "a step in the right direction" because, depending on how Apple and its carmaker partners deploy the technology, it could "help solve distraction issues. Just push the button and you can interact with the service. It would address some input-related distraction issues."

In fact, the complexity for automakers of having to accommodate a variety of "brought-in" devices in the car may lead them to attempt to simplify infotainment systems and take better advantage of the hard-wired advantages of the automobile over those of a smartphone: space and power. "Physical buttons work great in the car but not on the phone," Koslowski said.

Ironically, that could lead the industry back in the direction of more of the infotainment architecture being built into the vehicle -- where the "telematics revolution" started with OnStar 16 years ago. That would be an interesting swing of the ol' pendulum indeed.