Maybe someone can remind me when I first introduced the internet-enabled car to my annual speeches. I think it must have been 7 or 8 years ago. I wanted to use iPlayer in my car to listen to last night’s episode of The Archers. But I also used the example of getting into my car saying ‘Rolling Stones – Brown Sugar’ and the track, streamed from the cloud, would immediately blast from the speakers.
Well, today it all got a lot closer. Firstly GM announced that from next year, high speed 4G wireless internet would be available (as an option) in all its cars, Basically enabling an in-car WiFi hotspot which could be used for all the normal entertainment/communications purposes as well as vehicle monitoring etc. GM is not the first. Audi already offers the feature as does BMW with most manufacturers likely to follow suit.
In a separate announcement, Ford has done a deal with Spotify to use its voice activation capabilities to access Spotify and other smartphone and in-car services hand- free whilst driving. So my ‘Play the Rolling Stones Brown Sugar’ is now a reality!
In-car internet connectivity is likely to be the next big arena for sales of all kinds of add-on gadgets. It’s all part of the Internet of Things where ultimately everything will come with internet connectivity as standard. That’s everything from your cat or dog to your washing machine, gas boiler or curtain track. Last time we did the sums, we came to about 1trillion potential ‘things’.
Markets don’t come bigger than that!