The car is becoming a smartphone on wheels. Or a cinema. Or a gaming console. Or perhaps, if the automotive industry gets its way, all of those things at once.
That’s the territory being explored at the Car App World Europe conference, which takes place today, October 5, at Espace La Rochefoucauld in Paris.
Organised by market research firm Dataxis, the event brings together more than 200 senior executives from the automotive, technology, media, app development and connected mobility sectors for a day focused on one increasingly important question: what happens when the car becomes a digital platform in its own right?
A variety of discussion panels will explore those questions and more.
One panel, titled CarPlay, Android Auto & Native Apps: Who Owns the In-Car Experience?, brings together representatives from Harman, Stingray, Hyundai Connected Mobility, Stellantis and Aston Martin to look at the balance between OEM platforms, native apps and smartphone projection. The interesting bit isn’t simply which system wins. It’s whether the future involves all of them coexisting – and how easy manufacturers will make it for drivers to move between them.
The Car as an Audio Hub panel will examine music, podcasts, radio, streaming and the emerging opportunity for in-car advertising, with speakers from Appsfactory International, AdTonos and Bauer Media Group. In-car advertising in particular is timely, with BMW annoying owners recently over its in-car promotion of the Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. And there’s also a panel looking at in-car video, featuring representatives from TF1+ and Molotov.
Dashboard displays will also be a hot topic. The Bigger Screens, Bigger Opportunities: UX, Safety & Monetisation in the Multi-Display Era panel will bring together UX specialists from BMW Group and Jaguar Land Rover alongside Access Europe. Expect discussion around attention, safety, personalisation and how manufacturers can make multiple screens useful without turning the cockpit into an enormous tablet showroom.
And what about navigation, which is increasingly incorporating live traffic, vehicle data, charging information, parking, points of interest and AI-powered assistance? The Smart Navigation in Vehicles: Reinventing Routing & Mobility Experiences panel brings together representatives from Aximote, SoundHound AI, Stellantis, Renault and Parkopedia by Arrive. AI is likely to be a particularly interesting part of this discussion, with voice assistants moving beyond fixed commands towards systems capable of understanding more conversational requests.
Of course, none of these services work particularly well without connectivity, which makes the Next-Gen In-Car Connectivity & Communication panel another one to watch. Representatives from 3SS, Transatel/NTT, Skoda, Mitsubishi Motors Europe and smart Europe will look at how connected-car infrastructure is developing and what it means for digital services. As cars increasingly rely on the cloud, live data and remote software updates, connectivity is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a fundamental part of the vehicle.
That also makes the commercial side interesting. Who pays for the data? Who pays for the apps? And will motorists eventually find themselves subscribing to their car in much the same way they subscribe to their phone? There’s a danger that the connected car becomes a slightly ridiculous collection of subscriptions, apps and screens simply because manufacturers can put them there.
The more interesting outcome would be a car that genuinely understands what its occupants need, presents the right information at the right time and makes technology feel less like technology.
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