Q. How is the Internet of Things (IoT) making its way to the automotive industry?
A. Use of Web 3.0 or the Internet of Things on the ECU gives the ability to connect vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure and bring value to the driver. For example, if it is possible to predict the next signal light, or another vehicle around the corner in a U-turn, the safety of a vehicle can be increased.
In the future vehicle will become a part of the Internet. The vehicle itself becomes a transmitting unit of a lot of information in a car. For instance, it can be said that the car is like a weather station because temperature and other weather conditions of the particular area are known, which can be consolidated and used. This information could also be analysed for improvement of the engine performance or any other vehicle parameter.
The other way round is to take information from the outside into the car and provide it to the driver. Other trends include use of more number of cameras and various sensors like radar sensor. Radar sensor can detect the surrounding of a car and intelligently integrate information from the outside to make the car safer.
Q. Talking about safety, you mentioned dual-display, do you think it’s safe enough for the driver as he has to concentrate on the wind-shield as well as on the road?
A. That’s a good question .We have a big challenge which we call user-experience that is kept in mind when we develop products. This was an initiative which was started a couple of years back so that we don’t develop a product from an engineer’s point of view but also keep the user perspective in mind. This gave us a lot of insight into our products that were probably not well-developed in a way considering user-friendliness. When we consider things like dual-display or head-up display, these are the trends that are possible from an engineering point of view but they should ultimately add value to the driver. In one way, more of autonomous driving is required which means some simple questions need not be asked to the driver. For example, having automatic temperature controller in the vehicle is no longer needed to be set by the driver as auto-mode can be used. Similarly there are other modes even for wiper control. Rain sensors from Bosch can sense rain and control the wiper speed. So innovation is done in such a way that driver interaction is lesser but at the same time giving more information which is useful.
Q. How has voice control evolved over the years?
A. There can be different levels of voice control. Now, we are reaching level three. Earlier in level two, it used to be more of Q&A, means it was more of getting a question from a head unit and then responding to it and taking the next decision, whereas now a pretty complex sentence can be given to the head unit. For example, if you want to go to a place X in a country Y, then the system would take the sentence as it is and then decipher into the address or a navigable address. Similarly to tune into a radio station, you can decide and say the genre of music you wish to hear and things like that, and the system deciphers and tries to switch on that particular station. So this interaction actually brings comfort to the driver by virtue of reducing the number of inputs he’s supposed to give.
