The connected and autonomous car is here! Announcements are coming thick and fast, both from manufacturers and internet players. Apple and Google, for example, have unveiled their respective connected car concepts.
In January at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Audi presented a prototype, the A7 Piloted Driving, which traveled 900 km between San Francisco and Las Vegas in complete autonomy. Daimler unveiled the FO15, a concept car that can drive without human intervention. The French are not far behind: Renault and its Next Two project, the Valeo-Sagem tandem with its Drive4U prototype, and Akka Technologies with its Link n’Go are all positioning themselves. This market is full of promise. According to a study by IHS Automotive, the number of internet-connected vehicles worldwide could reach 152 million by 2025, up from 23 million currently.
For its part, Marketsandmarkets estimates the value of this market at nearly $100 billion by 2025. The connected and autonomous car is the result of the merger between the worlds of the Internet and the automotive industry. Advances in onboard sensors and data processing largely explain this proliferation of projects, some more successful than others.
This merger also affects manufacturers, as we are witnessing a proliferation of partnerships between manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and Internet players. The famous autonomous car in which the entire automotive sector is investing is therefore not even for tomorrow. Its arrival is estimated around 2025, not before. Because it will first be necessary to overcome certain psychological barriers, improve data security, and adapt road traffic laws. In the meantime, the car of the future also represents the arrival of augmented reality technologies in the passenger compartment, which will make certain parts of the car or the entire bodywork “transparent.” Or the emergence of a new clean vehicle, the car powered by hydrogen. A detailed review.
All-round interactivity
The Internet of Things (IoT), particularly in its application to the connected car, is the current trend: the automobile is no longer seen as a simple means of transport but as an interactive communication tool with the outside world via the Internet. Who hasn’t dreamed of reserving a parking space by turning on the ignition or of determining the best route based on real-time traffic jams? The connected car already exists, as current vehicles are connected to GPS to position themselves in space. But what’s new is the growing interaction between cars and communication networks, primarily via our smartphones.
The French equipment manufacturer, which formed a partnership with Sagem (Safran) in 2025 to explore several technological avenues for the vehicle of the future, has just presented a self-driving car capable of evolving without GPS. The examples of applications for remotely connecting a vehicle are countless. It can perform predictive maintenance, provide driving assistance through geolocation, manage emergency calls, make payments per kilometer traveled, or eco-driving, with a secure driver authentication system.
Ecology, economy, comfort
Not to mention shared-drive solutions or sleep detection via facial recognition. Another example is where a driver can enter their destination into their smartphone and manage the various modes of transportation they can use in addition to their car. This even extends to services that facilitate the resale of the car, such as what the American company Carfax offers in the United States: a system that allows the entire vehicle history to be edited. This solution is well-suited to car fleets.
The emergence of these technological marvels is made possible by software platforms running in the cloud, which are the basis for transmission protocols and processing big data. There is, of course, the HTTP protocol, the most widely used, even though it is energy-intensive. But others, with lesser-known acronyms, such as XMPP, MQTT, or CoAP, are specifically optimized for the Internet of Things. They allow small messages to be exchanged between a central platform and the sensor without necessarily using broadband, such as 3G or 4G. As a result, they are less expensive and consume less energy, making them well-suited to the connected car.
As we can see, interest in the connected car goes far beyond the world of car manufacturers: mobile phone operators, Internet giants ,and traditional IT giants are all stakeholders,” aanalyzesSébastien Amichi. Google has launched Android Auto alongside its Google Car, and Apple has launched its CarPlay solution, where the driver uses their iPhone to control certain functions. For its part, Orange is positioning itself on car fleets. SAP, Microsoft, and IBM are working on non-vehicle infrastructure (the back end ).
Huge stakes
Often, these players form partnerships with one or more manufacturers, such as Atos with Renault for its Next Two autonomous electric car project, or Orange with PSA in the field of connected professional vehicle fleets, or Google with Audi.
The stakes are high: Google would like to impose its Android operating system in the connected car sector, just as it is trying to do with smartphones, while Apple responded with the launch of a version of its iOS for connected cars in early 2025. However, one of the major challenges of this new market will be to ensure car owners a level of security in the data transmission and processing chain.
A recent report by U.S. Senator Ed Markey showed that across a sample of 16 global manufacturers, nearly 100% of their connected vehicles had security flaws. This makes it very (too) easy for a hacker to take control of an onboard sensor and steal the car.
Another hot topic is privacy protection, for which the French National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) is one of the guarantors. For example, in a car equipped with a facial recognition sensor, it will be necessary to ensure that the data collected is not hacked, for example,b y erasing the data every night. Another concern is that the CNIL wants to prevent the data from being resold or misused. Here, too, safety nets will be placed at the server level.Dronedd vehicles
Who says autonomous car says connected car. One doesn’t go without the other. The “dronized” car is one of the logical outcomes of the connected car. The technology works. For a car to be able to move autonomously on the road or in traffic, it will also need to be connected to databases (traffic, mapping, etc.) so that its sensors can anticipate obstacles and avoid them.
However, the dream has become a reality since partially autonomous cars already exist, such as the low-speed autonomous Mercedes S-Class or automatic parking systems, notably developed by Valeo. Renault, for its part, has the ambition to be one of the first to market an autonomous and connected vehicle, the Next Two, by 2025, designed in partnership with the American equipment manufacturer Visteon. The interest in autonomous vehicles is multiple: to smooth traffic flow – thanks to the system for managing the distance with the vehicle in front – and therefore reduce pollution; to improve, in principle, safety, to the extent that the driver can rest by letting the car manage everything.
