El Segundo, Calif. — Automotive systems provider Visteon Corp. will unveil its connected car demonstrator that delivers a flexible approach to providing Internet access in motor vehicles, including via the use of embedded phones, tethered mobile devices or USB connectivity cards, reports iSuppli Corp.
“Visteon provided iSuppli with an exclusive preview of its connected car demonstrator, which can link to the Internet through a variety of means,” said Richard Robinson, principal analyst, automotive electronics, for iSuppli, in a statement. “This approach will allow the Visteon system to capitalize on all growth opportunities in the Internet car market.”
“Clearly, vehicle OEMs have their own preferences for how connectivity and Internet access should be enabled in the vehicle,” said Upton Bowden of Visteon’s connected car development team, in a statement. “Our research shows some consumers did not necessarily want to be tied to an OEM’s choice of wireless service provider. Rather, they want to use their current connected device, with the intent of using the subscription package they already have.”
The new iSuppli report, “Internet in the Car: The Future of In-Vehicle Connectivity”, reveals an estimated 62.3 million global consumers will have Internet access in their cars by 2016, up from 970,000 at the end of 2009. The United States is expected to be the leading region for car Internet access during the next six years, with 28.3 million users in 2016.
Visteon also told iSuppli it has developed a production-ready, open architecture, automotive-grade infotainment and Internet development platform. This development platform will leverage many features from the connected car demonstrator project, says iSuppli.
The connected car demonstrator currently uses the Linux-based Moblin 2.0 open source software platform optimized for mobile Internet devices, which enables Visteon to use existing open source features and applications to reduce development costs and develop new features in parallel, says iSuppli. When a feature is ready, it can be ported to the specific platform.
Another advantage of the open source approach is software upgradability, which will provide a level of future-proofing for the platform and allow the system to be upgraded after launch, according to the market researcher.
iSuppli says Visteon plans to migrate the Moblin 2.0 Operating System (OS) to the automotive-compliant GENIVI OS as soon as it is released.
Visteon will also showcase its open architecture In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) development platform aligned with the GENIVI reference design at CES. This hardware platform will drive three displays, each with its own touch-screen-controlled HMI, plus a cluster display for driver-centric information, according to iSuppli. Each display will be driven by low voltage differential signaling (LDVS), a digital protocol that can run very high-speed audio and graphic information over a simple twisted copper pair, according to the market researcher.
The Visteon IVI development platform will be demonstrated using the combination Atom/Xilinx coprocessor configuration for IVI that was announced by semiconductor supplier Intel Corp. in the third quarter of 2009, says iSuppli.
As part of the connected car demonstration, Visteon will show how users can access third-party applications from its portal as well as configure the in-vehicle experience from their home PC environment. Visteon told iSuppli that the connected car platform is able to handle most Web pages using the systems browser.