Feature: In-car computing, smartphones, and the future of cars

What I'm Reading

Over the course of our series on the Future of Cars, a clear picture has emerged of where traffic flow is headed in the next few years. If today’s traffic is like a bloom of bacteria that responds collectively to changes in the environment, then tomorrow’s networked traffic, where all the cars are linked to the road, to the cloud, and to one another by a wireless nervous system, will be more like a fully formed, adaptive and evolving organism. In addition to the existing network of sensors already embedded in roads and highways, the cars themselves will become collections of sensors enmeshed in a peer-to-peer wireless network, with some master nodes on that network connected to the cloud via 4G.

But while picture of the evolution of traffic over the next decade has started to take shape, what isn’t yet so clear is the future of the actual car that will take part in this next-generation traffic flow. Specifically, one question remains unanswered: will the silicon brain of a future car be built-in, or will we plug our smartphones into the vehicle and use the smaller devices’ processors, wireless radios, and displays?

I put this question to our OpenForum participants, and the discussion that ensued was very, very good. But before I summarize what the OpenForum agreed on as a long-term solution (there was a surprising amount of consensus about how things should go), I’ll first present a summary of both sides of the issue.