Smart Home & Car Integration Brings Opportunity but Complexity for Car Manufacturers

The importance of the growing smart home market is drawing in car manufacturers and their development strategies. Mercedes, BMW, Ford, and others are all bringing Amazon Alexa and other smart home voice control platforms into their connected cars. But, voice control is just the start. According to ABI Research, by 2022, more than 500 million connected cars will have shipped and the ability to tie those vehicles into the platforms controlling more than 300 million smart homes around the world is driving investment and partnerships amid the vendors and technology suppliers across both markets.

“Extending smart home voice control into the connected vehicle is part of an ongoing integration that will pull together home and vehicle personalization. It marks a weakening of Original Equipment Manufacturers’ (OEMs) total control over the technologies embedded into their vehicles,” says Jonathan Collins, Research Director at ABI Research. “That means OEMs will have to select partnerships and technology suppliers that can best support the widest integrations.”

Starting with smart home voice control, vehicle integration with smart home management will increasingly draw other functions into the connected vehicle. Navigation, insurance, health, energy management, AI, media management, and other applications and supporting industries will integrate with connected vehicles and often directly through smart home interaction.

However, the smart home market remains a wild-west style market with a variety of vendors, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and others building fiefdoms with industry-wide standards remaining minimal. This leaves vehicle OEM manufacturers faced with conflicting options for technologies and smart home partnerships to maximize the appeal of their connected car strategies. “With the looming potential of autonomous vehicles, OEMs are faced with an array of potential partners to help support that generation of vehicles that increasingly threaten the OEMs sole role in controlling the functionality and appeal of their vehicles,” says Collins.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Integrating the Smart Home and the Connected Car report. This report is part of the company’s Smart Home research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights.

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