When Every Car Becomes a “Smart” Car
With more Smart Cars entering the market, the owner is now able to access all the meaningful information that helps improve the overall experience. For example, now a smart car can calculate the trip cost to Vegas by taking into account the current fuel cost or provide information on when the owner should go for the next oil change or even when a car is due for a maintenance check.
But what about the cars that are not “smart”? Well, as the on-board car computers were being put into cars decades ago, the mechanic relied on it to determine what was wrong with the car. The interface was where the mechanic could plug in a connector to pull in the various fault codes.
The Controller Area Network (CAN) interface in a vehicle provides a mechanism to access the on-board computer of the vehicle. As you can imagine, a significant number of cars today have electro-mechanical devices and a variety of sensors that are used to operate the vehicle fuel system, injection system and a host of other things. A view into this was to tap into the On Board Diagnostics (OBD). As the OBD got standardized and was required in all vehicles, it opened a new range of possibilities including the chance to turn even basic models into “smart” cars.
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There are a couple of good solutions that have been in the market for a while and are getting traction. The cost point is affordable and the features are getting richer with a number of add-ons. The product that’s making a significant mark is Automatic (www.automatic.com) – a dongle that pairs with your car and your smart phone. It provides a wide range of features beyond just car diagnostics. The other device is Mojio (www.moj.io) that has almost all the features that Automatic provides and additionally it has a cellular data module that sends chirps. Now Samsung has also entered the mix with its Connected Car dongle that is going to be LTE enabled; acts as a WiFi hotspot and boasts of other features. It is going to come down to an acceptable price point. Most of these solutions come at a one-time charge of $99 + a $4.99 per month service fee that includes the LTE data plan. However Samsung is packing in things that may be redundant. There may be a market for some of the features but this may be short lived as car manufactures are packing in more features to reflect the `Smart’ in most cars.
