Continental Automotive: Bringing Cloud to your Car
IBM’s Pulse2014 conference featured a presentation by Continental Automotive that showed the future of driving combined with intelligence provided by having your car connected to cloud services. The heavy focus on automobiles and the cloud at the 2014 Consumer Electronic Show tells us one thing: The cloud for your car isn’t a trend, it is here to stay. Having the cloud in your car will be the de facto standard in automobile technology going forward.
Continental Automotive is a German automotive manufacturer that looks to get ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile cloud technology in your car. Brian Droessler is a VP at Continental. During the Pulse2014 conference, he was quoted as saying, “Cloud will fundamentally reshape and reinvent the how consumers think about their vehicle and interact with it.”
Droessler also went on to say, “The cloud will transform how we bring new features and functions to the vehicle.” What are some of these new features and functionality? How about cloud powered driver automation? Continental said that other features on your car will purchased through a digital marketplace as opposed to physically buying the part and installing it in your car. The cloud will also give you advanced diagnostics for your vehicle as well.
One of the biggest features unveiled at Pulse 2014 is the “Electronic Horizon” capabilities. This allows the car to know what to expect as far as other cars on the road including the terrain and visibility ahead of the vehicle. Once the car will able to drive itself using the cloud, the person in the driver’s seat can begin working on an important project, read a book or any other activity that doesn’t involve operating the vehicle. IBM and Continental began working with each other back in September 2013 and their cloud automotive products are expected to rival products that will be released by Google, Apple and Blackberry.
