Linking Cars and Consumers

Surround sound stereos play the latest MP3 audio files. Back seat passengers enjoy DVDs, using headphones so they don't hear the driver's cell phone conversation as it comes through the car's stereo system.

The increasing amount of time spent in cars is prompting more people to view the auto as an extension of their home. As these people expect to migrate their personalized environment when they travel, automakers are racing to figure out how to join fast-paced consumer technologies with vehicles that will be on the road years after today's hot consumer product goes to a recycling center.

The short life cycles of consumer products pose a myriad of challenges for auto industry engineers, who must figure out how to adapt for the next big thing. Consumer products often have a lifetime of a couple of years, roughly matching the development phase for a car.

A key challenge is providing an architecture which will provide links for devices that might become popular during the decade-long lifetime of a car or SUV.

For example, USB and Bluetooth are considered two viable alternatives, but they were introduced in 1997 and 1998, respectively, and neither saw skyrocketing usage in their first couple years. Yet many cars from the late '90s are still on the road. Today, Bluetooth cell phones are gaining popularity as more regions mandate hands-free usage, providing a way for consumers to tie phones into the vehicle's sound system.

Major players feel the technology will expand beyond phones.

"Many consumer electronics devices will eventually be equipped with Bluetooth, allowing customers to connect their own entertainment to the vehicle's audio system," says Vance Peacock, senior manager vehicle entertainment and communications at the Chrysler Group.

However, that won't happen without effort. Bluetooth profiles must address the different types of devices, providing configurations which will enable vehicles to communicate with the latest consumer products. That appears likely to happen.

"While there are still some technical challenges that remain, we feel confident that Bluetooth audio and video profiles will soon allow consumers to as easily integrate their portable media devices into the car as they can with cell phones and PDAs, today," says Mark Spain, director of Microsoft's Automotive Business Unit.

As vehicle designers become more comfortable with Bluetooth, they're doing more with it. This gives consumers more versatility.

"Customers are looking for more sophisticated usage, such as having two or three nodes so two people in the back can listen to music via Bluetooth headsets while the driver is making a call," says Stephan Thaler, director of marketing for National Semiconductor's Device Connectivity Division.

Many MP3 players, PDAs, and other consumer products also employ the USB interface. This connectivity is also being designed into cars.

"There's no question in my mind that USB is going to happen. There's a lot of activity for inclusion by model year 2009, with some offerings coming sooner," says Jack Morgan, automotive marketing director for Philips North America.

But this physical connection comes with the challenge of how and where to put the connection. Dashboard plugs will result in a USB memory stick or cable coming out of the dash, while hiding the connection behind a door raises questions about easy access and providing enough free space to fit the user's hardware.

Then there's the difficulty of providing a plug to mate with different types of hardware without using a cable that can be lost or become tangled.

"MP3 players are all different sizes, so you can't package connections into the dash smoothly. When you have Bluetooth, you can stream audio to the radio wirelessly," says Winfried Moell, development engineer at Siemens VDO.

Storage space

Regardless of how this data is brought into the vehicle, there's also the challenge of where to store it. Hard drives have been too fragile and flash memory has been too expensive, but component manufacturers have been working overtime to meet the auto industry's stringent ruggedness requirements.

Hard drives are being designed into navigation systems, giving them capacity to store many regional maps and points of interest information including retail outlets and much other data. On the audio side, users want to store MP3 files, letting them replace mechanical CD changers.

Some say the drive will go into navigation, while others predict it will be in radios. At present, there's more demand for map storage.

"Navigation systems require a hard disk drive, and to fully utilize the drive, people are using it to store audio. Navigation systems are morphing into multimedia systems," says Vineet Ganju, marketing manager for Texas Instruments' Performance Audio Group. Earlier this year, TI unveiled a chip which transfers a CD in three to 10 minutes, fast enough to store music during even a short drive.

While hard drives currently seem to have the edge for design-ins, Flash suppliers are rapidly increasing capacity and narrowing the pricing differential. When capacities are substantially below the 10s of Gbytes stored on hard drives, Flash can compete, vendors contend.

"When you want to record from satellite radio or you want to have maps for navigation, all that comes back to storage. You want at least two Gbytes for satellite radio and navigation," says Michael Yang, product marketing manager at Samsung Semi of San Jose, CA.

Software concerns

These many different consumer inputs are being augmented by telematics, which brings Web-based information such as traffic information and e-mail messages into the vehicle. To assure fault-free operation when all these technologies vie with the standard functions of the vehicle, most automakers are employing a real-time operating system.

"When you start combining a number of consumer technologies with telematics, you have to be careful to guarantee that you have control of all the elements without any conflicts," says Dan Mender, business development director at

Green Hills Software Inc. The Santa Barbara, CA vendor recently unveiled an infotainment platform that gives designers assurances that problems with one program won't bring down other programs handled by the same microcontroller.

On another level of software, tier 1 suppliers are devising techniques that let them use various software modules for different manufacturers, who want various levels of connectivity for different product lines. Siemens VDO is addressing this with what it calls the Top Level Architecture. It bridges the different product life cycles in automotive and consumer electronics, making extensive use of standards such as XML and Java.

Hardware and related software, middleware, applications, and the display are all isolated. This lets system designers develop a different user interface for luxury vehicles and sports cars without altering the underlying software, even tailoring the user interface to an individual customer.

Even design software providers are getting into the act. When electronic system providers come up with schemes for handling the consumer environment, they want to use it in systems designed for several vehicles.

However, automakers all have their own vision for their look and feel, which varies across product lines, and vendors have to adapt. "Vendors need to design a different look and feel for every auto manufacturer," says Robert Kopersiewich, product management director at Engenuity Technologies Inc., which makes HMI design software. He added that much of the back-end programming is re-used regardless of the look and feel.