The automotive industry has been through three decades of transformational change. From petrol/diesel to automotive, from manual driving to self-driving.And it’s becoming increasingly harder for manufacturers to keep up with the pace of technology. It has helped in all areas of driving, from safety to economy, efficiency to handling.
Although we are looking at one area in particular today of cars that technology has had a profound impact on, and that is the entertainment that you get inside cars. Many cars, for example, can now act as portable Wi-Fi spots, allowing those who aren’t driving to connect and play at their favourite casinos found at casinos.com.
And the advances just keep jumping. It was only very recently that Tesla, with Elon Musk at the forefront, announced live on stage their self-driving, fully autonomous robovan. And so the future of cars and the technology involved in them is very exciting.
Follow on the journey
If you look inside most modern cars now, it seems like a huge jump from the days of cassette tapes and radios only. Many new cars are pre-built with huge entertainment systems. But how did the journey follow evolve to where we are today? Well, we’re going to take a trip down memory lane over the past decade to find out what’s shaped in-car entertainment.
Bluetooth, although one of the oldest forms of wireless connectivity between two devices in a short space, physically still dominates. Back in 2014, Apple Car Play and Android Auto burst onto the scene and totally revolutionised the connection between smartphones and our cars, allowing you to play your favourite playlists with ease. CarPlay in fact made its debut with the luxurious Ferrari FF in a world first, and since then both of the systems went on to almost because default fits in respective cars for many years following that, a good invention by both Google and Apple.
Bigger and bigger displays
Following on from this, and also following the trend of smartphones, displays now started to get bigger and bigger, and this is where we started moving to where we are today. There were a few reasons for the screens getting bigger. The first is that they are more accessible and easy to use. As more and more applications and options were becoming available on in-car entertainment systems, it then became harder to navigate with more icons and a small screen.
Whereas expanding the screens makes it easier for people to interact with, especially those who are shortsighted. It’s also beneficial from a safety point of view, as the quicker someone can find the option, the less time they are distracted from driving. And this is the exact same reason why you started to see the displays of smartphones start to get bigger for all of the reasons that we have mentioned above and many more reasons.
Stay up to date without hassle.
Another big development has been the ability for in-car systems to update over the air. If you’re unfortunate or fortunate enough to remember, to get some of the older car systems updated, you would have to actually take them to a garage, costing you petrol and also time. Whereas now they can update wirelessly over the air, eliminating this inconvenience altogether.
And the typical infotainment screen that you see in many new cars now is just purely for music or radio anymore, but rather it has many different uses, such as being a sat-nav or even allowing you to navigate through your contacts to find someone to call (handsfree, of course). This is also a bigger development than it first appears, as it’s vital to stay up to date no matter what device you’re on that connects to the internet, and cars are now an extension of this. As updates are done for various reasons, and one of these reasons sometimes is because of security, not staying up to date could leave you vulnerable to possible cyber attacks.
In Summary
Hopefully this trip down memory lane has brought back some memories of some of the older entertainment systems that we were restricted to as you go back further in time, and it has also illustrated how we got to where we are today.
Now every single new car, with the exception of a few, comes with a built-in car entertainment system as standard. Something that was once seen as a luxury with screens in the back of headrest being the brand new thing has now become commonplace. And as you can appreciate, technology isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, and so it is going to be interesting to see how much more it can evolve during our lifetimes.
