An Open Automotive Alliance: Google is Coming to Your Car

In an effort to combat against and compete directly with consumers’ usage of their own personal systems to entertain, inform, and overall occupy passengers within vehicles, Google yesterday announced a partnership with some of the most popular car companies (General Motors, Honda Motors, Audi, and Hyundai) called the Open Automotive Alliance. This collaboration will allow the car companies to utilize and offer Google’s highly popular Android operating system in their vehicles. This is also a win for the technology companies who will benefit from getting their software into the hands (or wheels, in this case) of the vast majority of car buyers.

Until the advent of mobile device’s popularity, affordability, and easy access, carmakers did not need to worry about whether consumers would be interested in their built-in entertainment; they usually were. But now, passengers are bringing their own personal systems into the car, making the need for these add-ons archaic. In much the same way that a personal Garmin system may make a navigation system within the car irrelevant, a tablet may make a DVD player irrelevant.

While carmakers and companies such Ford and Microsoft–with the creation of the MyFord Touch system–have begun to try to adjust to rapidly changing technology, creating programs to run specifically in their cars has caused the same problems that any other company has with creation expenses. For example, creating a weather app for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android systems is a different process for each; a company must create multiple apps. This can be time-consuming and more importantly, costly. With vehicles, we see the same issue; the app for a Ford is different than the app for a Jeep. This Open Automotive Alliance will eliminate these drawbacks.

This isn’t the first time that a fusion within the two industries has been attempted. As early as 2009, GM, BMW, and Intel formed the Genivi Alliance, wherein the car companies would use the Linux operating system in the cars. However, the Android-based Google system has a much greater advantage over this system due in part to its popularity and more so, its accessibility and more expert, driven technology.

The concept of a “computer on wheels” has certainly become widely accepted across the car industry now, with such automakers as Tesla producing the Model S Sedan which comes equipped with a 17-inch touchscreen. Additionally, the company CloudCar has produced a small apparatus that can be plugged into a car, providing “infotainment” to the driver and its passengers. Allowing the device to plug into the car lets the user upgrade the software and apps as they choose, much in the same that we would plug our mobile phones into our computers to upgrade.

In a technologically advanced age where everyone is vying to have the “the next best thing” or the “most innovative design”, car manufacturers must begin to compete. Although it may seem as if everyone already has a personal mobile device of some sort, it may soon be that their cars will be their newest, greatest, and–most notably–largest, gadget yet.