iPhone Focused Car Integration Arrives: Will Luxury Autos Suffer?

Source: iPhone Focused Car Integration Arrives: Will Luxury Autos Suffer?
After Samsung’s recent announcement of their new Galaxy S4 phone, the mobile landscape has been slightly changed yet again. During the launch of the S Voice Drive, Samsung made it clear that it’s targeting Apple’s Siri Eyes Free and trying to improve on the design. However, as I watched the event and wrote the subsequent coverage of the feature, I began to wonder how this will affect vehicle manufacturers and the systems they have spent millions of dollars developing.
Before Microsoft Car’s platform and Ford’s acquisition for their Sync product, many in-vehicle voice control systems were abysmal at best. Mercedes-Benz’s COMMAND system could barely understand voice commands, and BMW’s i-Drive system was overly complicated and difficult to use. Sync was one of the first systems to actually understand spoken commands, and I argued that it was one of the best systems out there.
Ford tried to follow up with MyFord touch, which recognizes even more voice commands but was plagued by glitches in the user interface. General Motors countered with Cadillac’s CUE system, designed to mimic the iPad’s touchscreen. Like MyFord touch, it has also been plagued with problems. Both systems rely heavily on touch interfaces, which lack the tactile feedback of older systems, making them difficult to use while driving. Relying on voice commands is a must. While both systems do very well with voice commands, neither of these very expensive systems does more than what Eyes Free and S Voice Drive do (except for controlling the climate control, which will likely be addressed soon).
Ford Sync is a modern success story for the company. Many people who order or buy from the lot Ford vehicles upgrade their vehicles to include the technology. This increases the average cost of the vehicle. This luxury equipment is now being adopted by all car manufacturers, which means that the average price for new cars is rising.
Should OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) be concerned? With the voice command technology that comes with buying a smartphone and using a service like RealVNC to connect that system to the vehicle, it seems many of the OEMs will have to redesign their systems to take advantage of the built-in phone. At first, this additional integration might be part of a more expensive “deluxe package” option, but this type of integration is much easier to fit into vehicles since all the heavy lifting is done by the phone itself.
You see this now with Opel’s Adam and Chevrolet’s Spark. These inexpensive vehicles that don’t have expensive OEM solutions adopt the mobile interfaces faster than the vehicles with the expensive add-ons. While I doubt this would drive a Cadillac CTS buyer to a Chevrolet Spark, people will start questioning the need for the really expensive infotainment upgrades, and maybe stop ordering their vehicles with them.
OEMs need to create other value-added options to make their expensive upgrades worth the price, and it will be interesting to see how each manufacturer addresses this potentially growing problem.
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