That’s the question being posed by Ralf Lenninger, head of system development, innovation and strategy at Continental’s interior division. Recent onroad trials of eHorizon, Continental’s dynamic electronic horizon, have prompted him to conclude that it is getting ever closer.

What eHorizon gives the driver is detailed data on the highway conditions ahead including gradients and curve radii.

What it can also provide however, says Lenninger, is up-to-date information about variable speed limits, temporary traffic signs and lane closures.

It does so by employing what Continental refers to as swarm intelligence.

Connected vehicles in the area at issue upload data to the cloud and connected cars entering the affected area can immediately benefit.

It means that in future eHorizon will be able to make an assessment of the road ahead says Lenninger, and determine whether fullyautomated driving is appropriate or whether the driver will need to switch to partially-automated driving instead.

“The better the information base, the safer, more efficient and more comfortable the vehicle,” he observes.

As well as communicating with the cloud, cars will increasingly communicate with one another. On the heavy truck side this has resulted among other things in trials of platooning.

Control is in effect passed to the truck at the head of the column allowing all the other trucks to drive closer to one another thereby making better use of the available highway space and saving fuel.

Vulnerable road users

If vehicles are equipped with Vehicle-to-X (V2X) technology then they will be able to communicate with vulnerable road users such as cyclists too, exchanging position data using WLANp short-range communications thereby making a collision less likely.

All that is required for a modern smartphone – which the majority of cyclists in the developed world are like to carry – to send and receive the data is a change or two to the communications chip. “It brings us one step closer to our goal of zero traffic fatalities,” observes Dr Bernhard Klumpp, head of Continental’s passive safety and sensorics business unit.

According to Germany’s Federal Statistics Office around 50% of people killed in traffic accidents are vulnerable road users such as cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians.

Vehicles are increasingly capable of receiving and sending all sorts of useful information.

“Connectivity is built into them these days,” says Mark Thomas, director of

product marketing, connected car, at Jasper. “They’ve usually got at least 80

ECUs, some have got over 100 and they can all be monitored on a cloud basis.”

Based in Santa Clara, California, USA, and now owned by Cisco, Jasper is a leading

Internet of Things cloud-based platform specialist.

eCall due 2018

Connectivity means that the European Union will be able to implement its

eCall initiative from April 2018 onwards says Thomas, ensuring that if a car is in a serious accident the emergency services will be able to locate it and respond accordingly.

PSA is rolling out a package developed by TomTom that includes TomTom Traffic, Local Search, Speed Cams and

Weather to a number of its key global markets. Available on the DS5 under the

DS Connect Nav banner, it is appearing on the Citroen Space Tourer and Peugeot

Traveller too and on the newly unveiled Peugeot Expert and Citroën Jumpy/Dispatch light commercials.

Aside from the foregoing, other advantages says TomTom include its ability to tell the driver how much service stations in the vicinity are charging for fuel and which car parks have vacant spaces.

Car parking information

Ford underlines the point that the way to obtain data on available parking spaces is to source it from the vehicles using the parking lot rather than from the car park itself.

With permission from the participants, Ford intends to collect information from cars entering and leaving parking spaces in a defined area – in effect, a miniswarm – to predict available spots taking into account time of day and location. It will form part of the company’s GoParkPainless Parking experiment.

It is a sensible approach given that obtaining information from fixed assets can be problematic. That is something highlighted by a report published last

September by the United States Government Accountability Office.

“Vehicle-to-Infrastructure – V2I – technologies are expected to offer benefits but deployment challenges exist,” it observes.

They include issues surrounding the sharing of radio frequency spectrums with other users, interoperability, data security and liability, a lack of resources at local government level to fund V2I systems and ensuring that drivers respond appropriately to V2I warnings.

The shortcomings of the highway infrastructure are likely to result in difficulties when it comes to introducing selfdriving vehicles. “We don’t have roads that are optimised for autonomous driving,” Thomas observes.

Data analysis

One answer to some of the foregoing challenges may be to carefully analyse all the tiny 10-to-15-second pieces of data that are already available in the ether. That is the approach being taken by Ford and IBM in a pilot programme in the USA.

The Ford Smart Mobility Experimentation Platform spots patterns, correlations and trends and writes codes that allow people to make better-informed decisions about their journeys.

In doing so Ford and IBM are using technology similar to that already in place in the stock market, where data is aggregated quickly to enable rapid transactions. It is an approach familiar to energy companies that monitor grids, identify any requirements for maintenance in advance of a possible failure and despatch crews accordingly.

The Ford/IBM approach underpins the Dynamic Shuttle trial now underway at the Big Blue Oval’s Dearborn, Michigan, USA campus.

Should one of the Transit passenger carriers being used to transport staff develop a fault, then the platform will start routing requests away from that vehicle to other Transits in service. That will allow another shuttle to be deployed to keep all riders on schedule.

Real-time analytics can also be used to alert a traveler to a major problem on the local road network and advise the individual to catch the train instead to get to his or her destination on time.

Interactive devices

Contacting people via the items they wear rather than through their smartphones or through the vehicles they are driving could become increasingly common, suggests Ford.

In response it has set up the Automotive Wearables Experience laboratory at its Research and Innovation Centre in Dearborn.

Much of what the lab is currently working on would appear to complement onboard vehicle technology rather than replace it.

Lane-keeping assist for instance could become a little more sensitive if a smart watch sends data to the car that infers the driver failed to get enough sleep the previous night. If a driver’s heart rate increases as traffic intensifies then the vehicle’s adaptive cruise control or blind spot information system could increase the distance between vehicles giving the individual some breathing space.

Drivers have shouted impotently at their cars ever since the horseless carriage was invented. Verbal instructions will soon prompt a reaction from Volvos, however, promises the manufacturer.

Volvo users will shortly be able to talk to their car via Microsoft Band 2 and instruct it to do everything from start the heater and set the navigation to a chosen destination to lock all its doors via Volvo on Call, the manufacturer’s mobile app, and a connected wearable device.

“Let’s face it – who hasn’t dreamed of talking to their car via a wrist-worn wearable?,” says Klas Bendrik, senior vice president and group chief information officer at Volvo Car Group, and a man clearly not without a sense of humour.

The general thrust of developments in connectivity technology should benefit car clubs and car-sharing businesses in particular.

Vehicle sharing

Connecting technology is a point not lost on General Motors.

In January it inked a deal with Lyft, a rideshare company active in over 190 cities in the USA, to create an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in North America. GM is investing US$500m (€438.3m) in the business and gets a seat on the board.

In March, GM announced the launch of Commercial Link in the USA. Using the same embedded hardware as OnStar – which is now being rolled out in Europe – it gives customers instant access to information on everything from a vehicle’s whereabouts to how much fuel it is using, for US$10 (€8.70) a month. Manufacturers want to make money out of data wherever they can, points out Thomas.

In Austin, Texas, USA, Ford Motor Credit is trialling Ford Credit Link which allows a vehicle to be shared by groups of from three to six people under a 24-month lease. They can reserve drive time, check vehicle status, keep up with maintenance, communicate with one another, view their account and make payments through a vehicle plug-in device and app.

“Traditional vehicle ownership is looking more and more like deciding to buy CDs when you can download music online,” Thomas remarks.

While technology is having an enormous impact on the way fleets operate, it is not perfect. The new Jumpy/Dispatch and Expert are available with a camera that can detect speed limit signs and offers the driver the option of touching a button to use the limit as the basis for the van’s cruise control/speed limiter settings.

Some markets impose speed limits on vans depending on their gross weight that differ to those that apply to cars however and PSA’s system does not take this into account.

Nor does the system take into account the different limits that apply if the driver happens to be towing a trailer.

“The pace of change is skyrocketing,” observes Thomas.

He’s right – but it still needs a tweak or two.