Jeremy Carlson is the principal automotive analyst at IHS Markit. He spoke with Aftermarket Business World about the connected vehicle market and announcements at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and Detroit Auto Show in January.
Relative to the autonomous vehicle market in general, do you believe we’ll see ride sharing/hailing services leveraging the technology first?
Most definitely. The ride hailing business model is the one where we expect to see the biggest impact in terms of miles driven. Mobility services are going to be the first place where we have fully autonomous vehicles deployed.
How will this focus on shared mobility affect unit sales?
We’re really early on in thinking about this. What will shared mobility, autonomous driving and electrification mean for what vehicle segments?
In the future, there will be companies selling units, and some selling miles or time, at least to some portion of the population.
What were some of the most significant products or announcements around autonomous vehicles at CES?
This was a CES that was really about the gestation of technology. We saw a lot of big headlines in the last several years at CES around autonomous driving, around new mobility solutions, vehicle electrification, etc.
Some of the bigger trends included domain controllers. There were two variants, one in the cockpit, with the network center stack as well as the instrument cluster. There also were heads-up displays.
On the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) side, networking all of those systems into one brain in an autonomous vehicle is something we’ve seen. NVIDIA made headlines this time, and it’s not a new thing. We’re actually seeing it ready for production vehicles now.
The other big element was around mobility. Toyota has introduced a platform for mobility services, and they have significant scale.
How did this differ at the Detroit Auto Show?
The big story there was trucks. There are a lot of SUVs and crossovers, but trucks are the big theme.
We see driver assistance apps going into new vehicles, and incremental functionality to help us move closer to Level 2, 3, and 4 autonomous driving. It’s incremental at this point, and we’ll need some big steps to get us to Level 3 or 4.
At CES everything is very shiny and new, and in Detroit everything is more realistic and toned down. There’s a different focus. In Detroit, they are looking more at what is coming in the next six months, rather than a long-term vision of where we can go.
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