Thilo Koslowski, vice president of Gartner's Automotive and Vehicle ICT Manufacturing Industry Advisory Service.
Q: Due to the growth of digital music, how do you see automotive technology changing to meet the entertainment demands of consumers?
TK: This is certainly a big trend going forward. The idea is that ultimately you will have access to your digital content wherever you are. Today that's pretty much still locked into a portable device, or maybe a hard drive you store it on. But long term, it will be totally different in the future where you just have a cloud of your own content following you wherever you are, that you can access wherever you are, including sitting in the vehicle. It will be streamed directly to your car audio stereo system. At that point you won't even have to carry around a device anymore.
Q: How will those advances in technology change the way business is done?
TK: That kind of advance brings with it all kinds of disruptive forces to existing business models. Things will be very different going forward. The way that radios will be designed will change. You just need to add the wireless technology in there that will connect you to that outside cloud. The devices would only provide the user-interface.
Cars and devices are going to have to be designed completely differently. We not only have to be able to access our content, but do it in a safe way while driving. Maybe that means voice recognition, maybe gestures, maybe at some point there will be applications that will sense your mood and automatically change the content based on that, keeping you focused on driving. It might sound strange, but ultimately these technologies will allow you to automate how you consume content in your vehicle.
We're not there yet, but there are signs that we're getting closer.
When you think about WiMix where you do have wireless long-range technology that gets you access to the server where all your content is residing and then all you need is a WiMix set in you car stereo to access it.
Q: What does this all mean for the aftermarket?
TK: Given the economic challenges that we're facing, people are delaying their vehicle purchases. I think the aftermarket has a huge opportunity here to provide these solutions that will allow consumers to keep their existing cars but still grow these new technology innovations and allow them to benefit from the new offerings going forward. The aftermarket is almost essential to allow consumers to meet their demand and their needs in a time where consumers will be very reluctant to spend a whole lot of money to get that technology by buying a new car.
Going into 2009 and 2010, hopefully we'll see much more innovation from the aftermarket, and not just from the big players, but a lot of small companies that start up over the next 12-18 cars.
Product development cycles in the automotive industry is between 4-5 years, and if you consider that, you are pretty much outdated by the time the vehicles hit the showroom because some of those electronic design decisions were made years ago, before some of the new technologies even existed. That's one of the key challenges the auto manufacturers are dealing with. The iPod has been around a long time now, and we're only seeing a few companies offering those audio solutions that will allow you to plug into you device.