The connected car: coming to your street soon

By next year the car will be the third most-connected place in which people spend time, says Intel's Staci Palmer. “And by 2016,” she claims, “how connected a car is will be a critical buying decision”.

That's why Intel has invested $100m over the next three to five years to act as a catalyst for innovation and to build relationships with manufacturers. Ms Palmer says today’s one-year olds already expect technology to offer the functionality of iPads.

“Imagine what sort of user experience they will demand when they reach driving age,” she said. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that self-driving cars could mean that those one-year-olds may never end up taking their driving tests.

Until self-driving cars become commonplace, focus is on adding comprehensive connectivity to cars. That means Facebook might tell you where that event is happening, and warn your friends that traffic is holding you up. Although car makers are already making their cars more technologically aware, Intel is not currently a major player. Renesas, Freescale, Texas Instruments and others are already well established, and rival makers such as Nvidia are also trying to get into the area.

Ms Palmer cited examples of cars that could communicate directly with each other so that routes could be recalculated in the event of bad weather or an accident.

One vision of the future is being pioneered by car clubs such as Zipcar, where users sign up to access a fleet of cars dotted around cities, or Whipcar, where car owners put their own vehicles up for hourly hire. In the future, if car ownership declines but increased use is still needed, connectivity might allow users to “log-on” to a vehicle. So it could even change colour and add the accessories of your choice. Just like a PC desktop, a machine would take on the persona of its user.

Areas of focus for Intel could include in-vehicle applications, text to speech voice recognition, and the integration of connected car services into car design, the company said.

Ms Palmer argued that technology had made “improvements to lives, safety and productivity. There’s no better place to demonstrate that than inside cars.”

“In the US, the average driver spends the equivalent of two months of every year in car; it’s impractical for us to give up connectivity inside of the vehicle. The car is the mobile device of the future.”

Although existing schemes are focused on improving entertainment in cars, future applications could also adjust music and lighting to calm stressed drivers. Intel is employing social anthropologists to examine other possibilities, and has already carried out studies on what objects most drivers keep in their cars. It is also planning further academic research, led from a new research centre at Karlsruhe.

At Ford’s high security proving ground in Lommel, Belgium, the American car-maker is indeed already showing off prototype seats that gather data about a driver’s heart rhythms. The aim is not simply to detect a heart attack – it's to gather data that will allow the car to detect the earliest warning signs; a light on the dashboard could advise on a trip to the doctor.

There is also the prospect of ‘digital goods’ entering the car. “We see people bringing physical goods into cars to personalise them, and we expect a digital equivalent to emerge,” Ms Palmer said. As car dashboards become more screen-based, for instance, that could even mean a digital pair of fluffy dice.