Date: 04/10/2012

Vehicles with safety and security telematics solutions to reach 49% in 2017: ABI Research

ABI Research reports the penetration of safety and security telematics solutions in new vehicles is to rise from 10.2% in 2012 to 49% in 2017.
Vice President and practice director Dominique Bonte comments: “Clearly, progress in government mandates in both Europe (eCall) and Brazil (CONTRAN 245) will be important growth drivers for the uptake in safety and security telematics solutions in the next 5 years. However, strong commercial drivers also exist with safety high on the public image priority list of many car OEMs and features such as advanced remote diagnostics and preventive maintenance becoming instrumental in offering better service and an optimized user experience to car owners.”

The findings reported by ABI includes:
While embedded systems are touted as the only dependable way to implement telematics safety features by most OEMs, Ford continues defying this paradigm by bringing emergency calling functionality via its hybrid phone-based SYNC system to Europe in 2012. In a similar vein, Ford has partnered with insurance vendor, State Farm, in the US to begin (smart)phone-based UBI solutions. In both instances, Ford is planning to roll out products across its entire vehicle range to all its customers at no additional cost, bringing safety telematics and UBI within reach of the mass market.

While safety and infotainment connected car features are often implemented on a shared hardware platform, increasing concerns about security breaches and cyber-attacks are prompting the automotive industry to isolate safety from infotainment functionality. If this is not done on a hardware level, this is certainly done on a software level through virtualization or container approaches.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N