LA JOLLA, California -- In a few years, your humble car will be able to download music wirelessly from your home LAN, read your e-mail to you and automatically play your favorite songs on the way to work.
It will, that is, if automakers and technology companies can agree on open standards that will make these types of applications inexpensive and practical. Proponents of several protocols under consideration -- meeting at this week's Eye on Auto telematics conference near San Diego -- say there's no reason why a car can't be as much a part of a network as your home computer.
"A huge portion of the success of the Web is that it's easy to put a website up there" using HTML, said Scott Andrews, outreach manager for the Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration, a coalition of major automakers that seeks to create standardized multimedia interfaces in cars.
"If you develop an (auto) service and take it to market, and it doesn't work out, you're out millions of dollars. That's a very expensive way to develop a service."
That's the problem with current in-auto services such as OnStar or those provided by the newly released BMW Series 7 automobiles. Because the companies have spent millions of dollars developing their services, they must charge prices that make them attractive mostly to affluent consumers.
And third-party developers, which are used to large-scale production and standardized technology, find it prohibitively expensive to develop products for the platform.
Carmakers themselves are reluctant to embed expensive systems in cars that might be on the road for 10 years -- and out of date in one.
The most promising solution appears to be OSGi -- the Open Systems Gateway Initiative -- which seeks to create open specifications for broadband services delivered to cars, homes and other environments. Last month, the consortium, whose 70 members include Sun, IBM, Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, released its second version of specifications for those services.
Cars with OSGi-compliant electronics should start showing up around 2003, said OSGi president John Barr, who is also director of standards realization at Motorola.
"We need an end-to-end solution that opens up cars to third-party developers," Barr said.
Notably, Microsoft -- which views Sun's Java as a threat to further popularizing its Windows architecture -- is not one of OSGi's members.
What might an OSGi car look like?
For one thing, it would be internally networked so that, say, anti-lock brakes might interact with traction control and engine-control systems. If one system failed, another might compensate.
Other functions might allow the car to sense external conditions and adjust internal conditions accordingly -- cutting off your voice-read e-mails, for example, when the car's GPS system senses that you're going through an intersection.
Naturally, you would also have to create "firewalls" in the network that would prevent critical applications from being affected by less-important applications. After all, you wouldn't want your satellite radio system to slam on your brakes.
There's also the issue of "driver distractibility" -- industry shorthand for having so much cool technology on board that the driver crashes. Most displays under discussion continue the luxury car tradition of putting small, uncomplicated screens where the traditional AM-FM radio used to be. Many of the functions in a networked car would be voice-activated.
Do consumers really care about having their e-mails read to them in the car?
Supporters of open auto standards aren't sure, but they don't really care. Once standards for cost-effectively linking cars into networks become reality, developers will dream up their own applications, just as the Internet spawned thousands of new businesses.
"Of course, you're going to get a whole bunch of things (in a networked auto) that nobody really wants, like Pets.com," said Andrews. "But you're also going to get a lot of interesting stuff like Amazon.com."
