In a global survey of 1,514 consumers 18 years or older, Cisco found that 57 percent would put their trust in a driverless vehicle. The answers varied wildly depending on country, with 95 percent of Brazilians embracing the concept of a silicon chauffeur. In Japan skepticism is still very high with only 28 percent willing to give up direct control of their cars.

In the U.S., where many of these autonomous vehicle technologies are being tested, acceptance was above the global average at 60 percent. What’s more those Americans surveyed weren’t just a bunch of wild risk-takers: 48 percent said they would trust a driverless car to ferry around their children. In general, western Europe was less accepting of vehicle autonomy than North America, and rapidly developing regions of the world like India and China were the more enthusiastic.

Of course, consumer perception of a technology depends largely on how it’s presented to the public. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk last week made that very point when outlining Tesla’s future autonomous vehicle plans, saying he didn’t like the connotations of the term “driverless car” because it implies a complete ceding of control. Musk’s term of choice is “autopilot.”

But according to Andreas Mai, Cisco director of product management for smart connected vehicles, the survey didn’t sugar coat its question. Its exact text: “Imagine a car on the road that is controlled entirely by technology and requires no human driver (i.e. Johnny Cab from Total Recall). How likely would you be to ride in such a car?”

I’m generally a proponent of connected car technologies and look forward to the day when advanced sensors and ad hoc wireless networking would largely automate my daily commute. But I have to say if presented with that question on Cisco’s survey my answer would “no.” I would be willing to give my car autonomy in many situations, but the idea of being reduced entirely to passenger status doesn’t sit well with me. If Cisco’s survey is truly representative of the public’s current mindset, then we’re a lot closer to creating a driverless highway network than I ever imagined. (For information on the connected car, see GigaOM’s infographic)

Of course, as with any industry produced survey, you do have approach Cisco’s numbers with some healthy skepticism. Cisco isn’t Ford or Google, but it certainly has some skin in this game. It produces the security software and router hardware that would be used to deliver connected and autonomous car services. In general, though, Cisco tends to produce very thorough industry reports such as its Visual Networking Index of internet traffic.

Cisco asked some other interesting questions in its survey. For instance, it found that consumers are eager to connect their vehicles to the internet of things if they can get tangible benefits. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they would allow remote monitoring of their driving habits if it produced savings on their insurance premiums or auto repair bills.

Another 64 percent said they would be willing to share even more personal information, such as their height and weight and entertainment preferences, for the creation of a unique driver profiles. In a such a scenario, your car could recognize a specific driver by voice imprint and adjust the steering column and seat position automatically and then immediately tune the entertainment system to favorite presets. A surprising 60 percent said they would even provide their automaker or a third-party company with sensitive biometric information like fingerprints or DNA if it could help make their vehicles secure.

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“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self-driving,” Musk said in the interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

Musk told Bloomberg that he’s discussed the autopilot concept with Google’s engineers and even mentioned the possibility of Tesla and Google jointly developing such a system. But Musk later tweeted from his Twitter account that his comments to Bloomberg were meant to be off the cuff, and that Tesla and Google weren’t announcing any big new initiative.

“Creating an autopilot for cars at Tesla is an important, but not yet top priority,” Musk tweeted. “Still a few years from production.”

Musk’s notion of an inexpensive autonomous driving system is an interesting one as it does away with the complex light detection and ranging — or Lidar — sensors that use 360-degree scanning lasers to render a 3D construct of the world around the vehicle. You’ve seen such funky laser arrays on top of mapping vehicles before, so the technology is readily available, but even a scaled down version of such systems would add enormous cost to car. According to Ford engineers, those costs are among the principal reasons why fully autonomous cars are still many years away from becoming reality.

But Musk posited that a car could simply use cameras to collect the data the car needs from its surroundings. The approach has its limitations compared to lasers. Cameras take pictures, while Lidar is registering physical objects, tracking their distance and relative speed to your car. Cameras would extrapolate that data from images. Stereoscopic lenses could allow for better depth perception on the road, but ultimately a camera-based system would depend on a lot of image-processing muscle to cull critical life-saving information from a massive pool of pixels.

Luckily for Musk, he’s not the only one thinking this way. Many of the new advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems that warn drivers of impending accidents or alert them to lane drifting are camera based. It’s also no coincidence that graphics card giant Nvidia is making a big play in the connected car space. The silicon vendor believes that its years of crunching real-time image and spatial data in PCs and game consoles make it the ideal company to power future car sensor systems.

Eventually cars won’t just sense the other vehicles and objects in their vicinity. Those vehicles will actively communicate with one another and those objects. Using a secure form of long-range Wi-Fi, a car will tell all the vehicles behind its about brake or change lanes. Transmitters on the highway will tell you a big curve is coming up. (For more info on the connected car see our infographic.)

Such vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could never replace sensors entirely since it would take decades for every vehicle on the road and every stretch of asphalt to become connected. But those technologies would allow cars to evolve cars beyond autonomy into a kind of ad hoc network, in which they would collectively make decisions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions.

Returning to Musk’s remarks, though, I find it particularly interesting how he’s positioning the concept of the driverless car. He’s calling it a form of autopilot not too far off from the adaptive cruise control we use in our vehicles. Musk is downplaying the idea of car usurping control from the driver. He’s keyed in on the biggest obstacle facing the autonomous vehicle today: consumer perception. Few people are ready to cede act of driving to computer.

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Welcome to the curse of the automotive industry: the lead time on new car designs and manufacturing schedules mean that the technology you’re buying today was developed years earlier. What’s more, that technology effectively becomes locked down in your vehicle. As soon as your drive off the lot the connected car system you have is the one you’re stuck with for years. (For more details on the connected car technology check out our infographic.)

Mobile processor maker Nvidia, however, is proposing a solution to that problem: why not make an upgradable connected car system. We “upgrade” our smartphones and tablets every year or two by buying completely new devices, but that’s not really an option for an automobile.

However, with processors based on its Tegra designs, Nvidia wants to empower automakers to build cars that not only have top-of-the-line computing components when they roll off the lot but also can be upgraded periodically during their long lives.

In short, Nvidia wants to help automakers make connected cars that never become obsolete.

Meet Jetson

According to Nvidia Director of Automotive Danny Shapiro, the company designed its automotive processors, called Visual Computing Modules, around a flexible framework that allows automakers to work future processor technology into what are typically three-year long development cycles. Rather than design a connected car system years away from production using today’s chips, engineers can design tomorrow’s cars using tomorrow’s chips, Shapiro said.

Tesla Model S

That program is already seeing some pretty significant results, Shapiro said. Within a month of shipping in Google’s flagship tablet, the Nexus 7, the Tegra 3 debuted in the Tesla Model S, powering its impressive infotainment system (along with a separate Tegra 2 processor to handle the instrument cluster).

That solves the first problem – making an infotainment system that’s not obsolete before it hits the show floor. Solving the next problem — making a connected car system that keeps up with the pace of consumer electronics innovation — is much trickier.

To tackle it, Nvidia recently launched a new automotive architecture called Jetson, which tries to solve more than just the problem of obsolescence. First, Jetson is powerful, incorporating Nvidia’s pixel-crunching graphics processing units alongside its Tegra VCM chips. Nvidia is hoping that its silicon won’t just be the brains of your infotainment system but an extra set of eyes on the road.

Danny Shapiro

Nvidia wants to power the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) emerging in the next-generation of cars, Shapiro said. Moving beyond adaptive cruise control and proximity detection, cars will eventually sport omnidirectional cameras that will “see” the road in all directions and possibly even scanning lasers that can model a vehicle’s surrounding in 3D. The art of processing image and spatial data just happens to be Nvidia’s sweet spot.

In addition, Nvidia has crafted Jetson to be a development platform that builds on its earlier work with its VCM chips. “Automakers can simulate future designs,” Shapiro said. “They can get their development done now, preparing for the next-generation chips and next-generation car apps.”

Finally, Jetson is modular. The core processing unit is designed to be swappable. That means an automaker can easily incorporate the latest and greatest version of Jetson into their existing connected car and infotainment systems each successive years. It also means, Shapiro said, that one day we could upgrade our car’s dashboard computers much like we’d upgrade an old PC.

Pimp my ride’s CPU

Unless you’re one of those folks that can afford to buy a new car every time the ashtrays get full, chances are any new vehicle purchase is going to be a long-term investment. Six years is not an unreasonable time to spend driving the same car, but that’s an eternity in the world of consumer electronics. Six years ago, what we now think of as a smartphone didn’t exist, and no one had yet developed many technologies we now take for granted such as speech-powered virtual assistants, 3D mapping and location-based social networks.

Many automakers have decided that trying to keeping up with the day-to-day advances of that technology is an exercise in futility and have built their connected car strategies around the smartphone itself. Ford and Chevy, for instance have designed their connected infotainment systems as extensions of the driver’s handset. So as the smartphone becomes more powerful, so do their cars’ dashboards.

An upgradable CPU would solve part of that problem, but not the whole problem. It doesn’t matter if your new car dash computer can process hi-rez images in real time if it doesn’t have the sensors to collect those images.

But the auto industry is trying to solve that problem as well. Ford has launched an open-source hardware program called OpenXC, which could let us upgrade components like heads up displays and sensor arrays in our future cars.

I’m not saying you’ll be able to turn your old jalopy into KITT from Knight Rider, but who knows? One day maybe we could customize our cars so they behave like new even if they don’t look like new.

Mouse car image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mopic

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Joyride is creating a voice user interface for the smartphone designed to function much like the voice command-and-control systems in your car. Founders Jeff Chen and James Zhang created Skyvi, a voice-assistant app for Android that received 5 million downloads. With the help of $1 million in seed funding, they’re now building similar voice-interaction technology into Joyride with the aim of creating a game, entertainment and education platform that is fully hands-free. Though you could use its app anywhere, Joyride CEO Chen said, it’s most useful within the restrictive confines of the car.

Joyride plans to launch an Android app in the next few months — right now it’s in a private beta — and its first service will be a trivia game Chen described as “a hands-free version of Words With Friends.” But Joyride plans to layer more games and services on top of the app, and will eventually invite outside developers to embed their own applications into the Joyride app framework.

“Think of Joyride as a portal,” Chen said. “It’s an enabling technology intended for people to build things on top of.” Joyride would be the overarching brand and its voice technology would not only power the apps themselves, but allow you to navigate between them. The first Joyride apps will be games, but Chen hopes to layer on any manner of service that lends itself to voice interaction, from audiobooks and music streaming to highly interactive language-learning apps.

Joyride makes use of the car’s stereo system through an auxiliary jack or a Bluetooth connection, though the app doesn’t actually tap into any connected car software or OS — it’s just using the speakers. From there, all interactions are done via voice — it makes use of Google’s speech API — requiring  no actual physical input, Chen said. The approach also has the advantage of making the app car agnostic. If you can connect your iPod to the car, you can connect Joyride.

Joyride’s $1 million seed round comes Cowboy Ventures and Freestyle Capital as well as from angel investor and Turnable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, who is also Joyride’s executive chairman.

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In a new report on automotive telematics, Juniper suggested the emergence of the connected car ecosystem would follow from the success of standards such as the Car Connectivity Consortium’s MirrorLink, which aims to help smartphone apps and in-dash displays talk to each other, and also from consumer demand.

“Demand is growing as consumers are used to the smartphone/app combination out of the car and are beginning to want it in the in-car environment,” Juniper analyst Anthony Cox told me. “What is driving this, though, is the fact that it has become easier to do through standards such as MirrorLink and therefore is reaching critical mass very fast.

“Getting the in-vehicle entertainment system right can be the difference between the sale of a $15,000-$20,000 car or not, therefore if others are doing it a vehicle manufacturer cannot risk getting left behind… The cost of including this feature will be very low, and the benefits extremely high.”

While connectivity has many potential uses in the vehicle, Juniper says infotainment will be the big driver – first through smartphone-tethering, then in-car systems. That said, the analyst house also noted a negative factor that could come into play: a slowing-down of the rate at which people are actually buying new cars in the developed economies.

One interesting point in the report was that of the big data opportunities that come up when you stick connectivity into a car. This could mean extra revenue for both telematics companies and the car manufacturers themselves, Cox suggested:

“While direct revenue from services is the most evident direct benefit from telematics, there are other benefits which may be equally important, such as the value which resides in the data that is generated from telematics installed in the vehicle.

“Indeed, there is increasing interest in seeking to develop a revenue stream derived from analytics of the data accrued from the myriad electronic interactions within telematics-enabled vehicles. Furthermore, if the datasets that are collected within the vehicle are then combined with related datasets from partners, the combined data becomes far more powerful — and valuable — from a predictive analytics perspective.”

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We’ve already seen location-sharing app Glympse make it into its first connected platform, Ford’s Sync AppLink. Now BMW’s strategic investment arm i Ventures is partnering with family locator service Life360 to develop in-car technologies that would allow family members to locate one another and coordinate their activities. i Ventures is also making an undisclosed investment in the San Francisco startup.

While an app like Glympse allows you to selectively share your location with anyone for a set period of time, Life360 creates a permanent share between a close-knit group such as a nuclear family. That allows Life360 to build services on top of that presence data.

“Imagine you want to meet your wife at your kids’ soccer game,” said Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360. “Right now you have to call her, get an address and then program it into your navigation system to get directions. That’s a lot of unnecessary friction.”

What Life360 proposes is an in-dash app that automatically keeps tabs on your family members’ activities. To find your wife, as in Hulls’ example, you merely have to tap on her portrait in the app, and her location is automatically fed into the car’s vehicle nav system.

BMW isn’t the only automaker that thinks Life360 shows promise in the connected car. One of the startup’s lead investors is Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology fund founded by Bill Ford, the executive chairman of his namesake company. The company recently closed a Series A round of $3.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage and EchoVC Partners.

As you might expect, Life360 as apps in the works for both Ford and BMW’s connected car platforms, but Hulls said its working with other automakers as well, including Mercedes, General Motors and Hyundai. While Hulls wouldn’t reveal which automaker’s platform would be the first to launch Life360’s app, he said the app would go live in a least one connected car system this year.

We’re already starting to location finding its way into more connected car apps and not just in the form of navigation software. Roximity and BeCouply are using presence data to push location-based deals and recommend nearby activities for the amorously inclined.

And while location-sharing isn’t a feature in most in-vehicle nav systems it’s starting to make it into many mobile mapping and navigation apps. Telenav recently announced an update to its iOS software that can share not only a user’s current location but also your intended destination, allowing friends to coordinate their activities on a map.

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According to Spotify Global Head of Hardware Partnerships Pascal de Mul, the updated iPhone (No word on Android support yet) will soon be able to pair with the dashboard AppLink system, streaming music through the car’s entertainment systems. Users will be able to play their songs, playlists and radio stations and even be able to create new radio stations on the fly with simple voice commands, he said.

Ford has been loading up on music streaming apps in AppLink, making it a key initial focus of its connected car strategy. Its library of supported services includes Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, MOG Music, Slacker, and Rhapsody as well as multiple radio station’s digital apps.

Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas said digital music streaming figures right into Sync’s sweet spot. Ford doesn’t have to explain the utility of the services to the driving public since music is already the most popular form of entertainment in the car. The integration of a streaming service into Sync is relatively simple. And since the content is audio only and can be manipulated through Sync commands, the apps all easily meet Ford’s requirements that no connected car app distract a driver from the road, he said.

At the show Ford also revealed it is adding AppLink connectivity to its EcoSport crossover SUV (pictured at top) just in time for its European debut. For also brought several apps Europe that were previously available in U.S. cars: Kaliki, Glympse and Aha Radio.

We got a chance to sit down with Mascarenas for a few minutes at MWC to get a quick update on Ford’s new open development platform, originally unveiled at CES. Though the program is barely more than a month old, 2500 developers have already signed up and downloaded the SDK. Many of those devs have already completed apps and have submitted them to Ford, and a few those apps actually received final approval, Mascarenas said. Mascarenas said Ford plans to announced those apps in the coming weeks.

Spotfiy doesn’t count since it began working with Ford before the development program was launched, Mascarenas said, but the program has opened up Sync to a lot of smaller developers who wouldn’t usually get Ford’s direct attention. Ford is now faced with a distribution and discovery issue. “If you go into an app store, there’s no easy way to find the apps that AppLink-enabled, Mascarenas said.

When the number of Sync apps was small, Ford could promote them individually. But there are now 63 AppLink-optimized apps, and that number will grow significantly as the apps start emerging from the developer program. Ford is working on ways to catalog them. Whether that means creating its own app store or portal Android or working with Apple and Google to spotlight connected car software, Mascarenas didn’t say. Ford could also go with the approach, GM appears to be adopting and create a catalog in the dashboard itself.

Correction: An early version of this post stated that Spotify’s Sync integration capabilities would be available on both Android and iOS devices. However the initial launch will support only the iPhone. 

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Books have always been Amazon’s bread and butter, and much of Amazon’s ebook strategy has focused on finding more ways and identifying new devices for people to enjoy the pastime of reading. The car is the logical next step, considering how much time people spend their automobiles on their daily commutes and simply running errands. In fact, a lot of drivers already do plenty of reading in their cars with audiobooks, using both physical and digital media. Some people have even managed to cram Amazon’s Audible books into their car stereos using USB drives or auxiliary ports.

Amazon stands to gain plenty by embracing that trend, and I don’t just mean by selling audiobooks in the car. (In case you’re wondering, it’s not possible today to stream an Audible book through Cloud Player). While there is a healthy segment of readers who just want audiobooks, I bet there’s a far bigger market of people who normally read their books in ink — in either the printed or digital variety — but would like the option of switching to audio when they get behind the wheel.

No large-scale development required

For Amazon to make that work it would have to supply its books in dual-media formats. You would then read from your Kindle or Kindle smartphone app when otherwise unoccupied, but once you stepped into your vehicle the device would automatically pair with the Kindle app in the car, which would immediately start reading your book aloud at the exact point you left off.

Amazon already has much of this technology in place. Last year, Amazon introduced Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to pair an Audible book with an ebook for a few extra bucks. Amazon isn’t just selling the same media in two formats, it’s integrating them. A narration feature allows you to listen along as you read from the Kindle — after each word is spoken the text is highlighted on the screen. Customers can switch between audio to visual-only formats with just a touch of the button.

It would be cinch for Amazon to integrate that technology into the car. It would merely have to develop software for the Kindle and Kindle apps that would integrate with the various automakers’ connected car interfaces, just as it’s done for Cloud Player on Sync AppLink.

It could also tap into the automakers’ speech recognition systems, allowing readers to pause the audio stream or navigate their books with simple voice commands. Amazon has invested plenty in voice and speech interface technologies over the last two years, buying both Ivona and Yap. Those acquisitions could come in handy when developing any new connected car technology.

Amazon stays mum

I should say now that we have no specific knowledge that Amazon is working on Kindle for the car, but just to be sure we put the question to the company itself. While an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the company today has the technology to seamlessly switch between book formats, Amazon wouldn’t comment on any future connected car plans. The spokesperson said as a matter of policy Amazon doesn’t comment on future product plans.

That’s pretty much what we expected to hear, but if Amazon does wind up pursuing this technology, I for one would buy it. Today I have an uneasy relationship with ebooks. I download the occasional tome on iBooks or Kindle, but for the most part, I still have an irrational attachment to paper books. I can get away with that attachment because today I can read a physical book in the same places I can read an ebook — on a train or in plane, while camping or lying around on the couch — but one place I cannot read a physical book is in the driver’s seat of a car. By creating a connected car app, the Kindle and ebooks in general would become immensely more valuable to me.

It’s not just consumers who would get excited about Kindle for the car. The automakers would fall all over themselves lining up to support it. One of the reasons the automakers have proceeded so cautiously with app development is a concern over safety — distracting apps could cause accidents. But the auto industry has been quick to sign off on any audio-only multimedia service, as evidenced by all of streaming music and radio apps that populate connected car dashboards.

In fact, audiobook apps have already made their way into many cars. Harman’s Aha content platform has already made into Honda’s connected car platform HondaLink, offering audio book libraries among its many channel choices. I’m actually surprised Audiobooks.com, a cloud-based streaming service, hasn’t launched a connected car app already.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Rob Byron

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The folks over at Gracenote have hacked the Ford Focus to get it to play different kinds of music depending on the car’s current driving state. By tapping into the car’s Control Area Network (CAN) — the in-vehicle system that handles communications between the car’s different controls and interfaces — Gracenote was able to get trigger different songs by turning on the windshield wipers or accelerating over 50 mph.

Here’s a video Gracenote shot demonstrating the feat at Music Hack Day in San Francisco last weekend:

Admittedly, programming a media player to cue up specific tracks whenever you perform a specific action is hardly a mood-sensing stereo. What Gracenote has done here is more of a proof-of-concept for Ford’s new OpenXC developer’s program. Using Ford’s OpenXC specs it built a CAN translator that opens up the vehicle performance and control data that would normally be locked within the car’s computer, making it accessible to the infotainment system. That’s never really been done before except in a case where a developer has worked in direct collaboration with an automaker.

Where Gracenote takes this technology next will be very interesting. Imagine if you could plug this info into Pandora’s music recommendations algorithm. Pandora already knows that when you’re in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones, you’re also in the mood to listen to Alabama Shakes and other bluesy rock ‘n’ roll. Once Pandora learns you like to listen to the Rolling Stones when on the open highway with the top down, it effectively starts learning your driving moods.

When you hit traffic, your intelligent radio knows by your braking and acceleration patterns to shift to more a mellow station. If you’re heading downtown on Saturday night maybe some dance music at high volume is in order. And when the first sign of raindrops appear, your radio – well, my radio at least – would immediately start playing soulful hard bop.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Maridav

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Last month at CES, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the commission was moving forward with a plan to clear 195 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi use. Those new frequencies, however, abut the 5.9 GHz airwaves the government has set aside for future vehicle-to-vehicle communications networks.

On Monday, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITSA) sent a letter to the FCC — signed by a veritable who’s who in the transportation industry such as AAA, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai  – warning the FCC of the potential for these new Wi-Fi networks to interfere with the wireless transmissions between connected cars.

“We support efforts to identify spectrum that may be utilized to expand Wi-Fi applications,” ISTA said in a statement. “But with over 30,000 deaths on our nation’s roads every year, we also believe it is critical that efforts to open up additional spectrum do not come at the expense of revolutionary life-saving technologies.”

As we’ve described before, the auto industry and the U.S. Department of Transportation have big plans to use a highly secure variant of Wi-Fi technology to network vehicles on the road, allowing them to share information about their trajectories, speed, accelerating and braking — even their destinations. These massive ad-hoc networks would allow cars to get early warning of highway conditions, react automatically to avoid accidents and eventually allow cars to coordinate their driving, making them semi-or even fully-autonomous vehicles. (See GigaOM’s infographic on the connected car of the future.)

If the commercial Wi-Fi signals were to bleed out into the protected Wi-Fi signals of the car network, the letter said, the public safety and transportation management benefits of the network could be nullified — along with the hundreds of millions of dollars automakers and the government have invested in developing the technology. The auto industry doesn’t want the FCC’s Wi-Fi plan stopped, but it did ask regulators to guarantee that safeguards would be in place ensuring that such interference doesn’t occur.

That might be easier said then done. Interference issues have killed more than one big spectrum proposal as LightSquared can attest. In this case, the cars and the Wi-Fi devices would be using short-range wireless technologies, which might help mitigate interference issues. But as anyone who has ever turned on their smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio in a car knows, you can pick up a Wi-Fi signal almost anywhere. And as outdoor Wi-Fi deployments become more prevalent, those signals are only going to get more powerful.

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