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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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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GM said it would use the increased bandwidth to offer new infotainment features such as audio and video streaming direct to the car in addition to the usual complement of OnStar navigation, security and emergency services.

The deal is a bit puzzling because it contradicts the bring-your-connectivity strategy GM has adopted of late. While GM cars are all linked via cellular networks for its low-bandwidth telematics services, GM has relied on it customer’s smartphones to provide the heftier connections necessary to support infotainment services.

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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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Automakers have been very careful about whom they let into their cars, for both safety and control reasons. So while carefully crafted partnerships with Pandora and Harman’s Aha abound, the connected car has remained largely a closed shop.

Cadillac CUE

Take the Cadillac CUE system for instance. GM had quite literally designed the Cadillac of connected car platforms, using haptic feedback and proximity sensor technologies to create a beautiful, intuitive interface, which an equally powerful hardware stack. But when I test-drove the car last summer, all of that power and sophistication seemed like a waste. At the time, CUE supported a single third-party app: Pandora.

But that changed at this year’s CES. Both General Motors and Ford announced open development platforms for their respective connected car platforms, potentially opening them up to thousands of new apps and services. While GM’s developer portal doesn’t appear to be live yet, Ford told us that 1,258 devs have downloaded its software developer’s kit as of Thursday.

There are some key differences between the two programs. Ford is pushing its Sync AppLink program to forefront, opening up the APIs in the Sync system that allows the car to act as an alternate interface for apps that run on the smartphone. What we’re likely to see is a lot of apps we already use become “Sync-enabled,” meaning you can activate and them control them from the vehicle dash or from Sync’s Nuance-powered voice command system.

Ford also announced a bunch of new developer partners, which give you an idea of the types of apps that will come out of the program. Amazon Cloud Player and Rhapsody will stream over the car’s speakers and are voice-enabled for music controls. USA Today and Kaliki will become in-dash news readers. Glympse will share the car’s real-time location with family and friends, while BeCouply will suggest nearby dating ideas for the Romeo that forgot to make plans.

GM’s program is letting developers delve more deeply into the dash, building software that will run over GM’s three connected car systems: CUE, Chevrolet’s MyLink and Buick’s IntelliLink. GM also appears to be promising that development will be consistent across all three platforms. That will be quite the feat, since GM designed each platform separately – in particular CUE – by using different vendors.

GM is also creating what amounts to an automotive app store. Once an app is tested an approved it goes into catalog from which drivers can browse and download apps, using their smartphones to provide the connectivity. GM said the catalog would be available in select model-year 2014 vehicles, meaning in new cars this fall.

An Apple vs. a Google approach to development

There are a lot of similarities between these programs and the ones of Android and iOS devices, but expect the automakers to follow Apple’s approach to development rather than Google’s. In fact, my bet is they’ll be much more strict than Apple is when it comes to what apps they in.

A good part of this has to do with safety. Ford and GM won’t approve apps that could potentially distract the driver, so don’t expect to watch Netflix or Call of Duty on your new Buick’s heads up display (though there is a lot of potential for video streaming and gaming apps on future backseat or passenger-side displays). If your app emits loud jarring klaxons at random intervals, it might not make it into the catalog.

But automakers also will likely institute restrictions for the sake of the good old walled garden. It might seem like these programs would be ideal opportunities for Google and Nokia to create full-fledged in-dash navigation systems, but that treads on the automaker’s own turn-by-turn turf.

The automakers aren’t opposed to the idea of a “nav app” you can download or integrate into your car. Chevy plans to launch a nav app called BringGo, which lives on the smartphone but can be interfaced to the MyLink system, a cheaper alternative to OnStar navigation. Chevy, though, is charging a one-time fee of $50 for the app. No one would buy it if you could merely download Google Maps into the dash for free.

It’s also important to note that these developer programs are confined to the infotainment systems of the cars. Anything that has to do with how the car actually or drives or performs. But that may be changing soon as well.

Though it didn’t get as much attention as Ford’s Sync developer news, Ford also took its OpenXC program out of beta, allowing developers to gain access to the speedometer, sensors and higher-order functions of the vehicle. It’s more an R&D project for now, but eventually developers may be able to apps and even modular hardware that can take the temperature of the engine, access the climate control and even upload diagnostic data to your mechanic.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mopic

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OpenXC is a joint project between Ford and open-source hardware developer Bug Labs to bridge the gap between the highly specialized and proprietary world of automotive computing and the world of open development. As part of that collaboration, Bug Labs demonstrated it could design new aftermarket hardware components like a solar-powered heads-up display that could be easily installed and yet integrate seamlessly into the car’s communications network.

But the primary goal of the project was to create is a vehicle interface module based on the open-source hardware platform Arduino It plugs into car’s internal communications network and gains real-time access to vehicle performance data like speed, acceleration and braking as well as vehicle sensor data. The module then translates that information into a format an Android smartphone or tablet can decipher. Developer are then free to build smartphone apps that can read the vehicle data or use the interface as the basis for a new hardware that integrates directly into the car.

“Ford is committed to innovating with the help of software and now hardware developers,” Ford VP and CTO  Paul Mascarenas said in a statement. “By connecting cars and trucks to wireless networks, and giving unheard-of access to vehicle data, entirely new application categories and hardware modules can be explored – safety, energy efficiency, sharing, health; the list goes on. OpenXC gives developers and researchers the tools they need to get involved.”

While there are some similarities between OpenXC and the new Ford Developer Program, it’s easiest to think about the former as an R&D platform for future technology and the Sync program as a commercial platform over which apps can be designed and distributed to millions of cars today. While Sync is primarily an infotainment platform – apps can play music, access Sync’s voice command system and use the in-vehicle displays, but they can’t figure out how fast your going or whether a semi is bearing down on your bumper.

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Aaron Dannenbring, Nokia Location & Commerce VP of product management and field opps, said that many of the latest enhancements for the Nokia Drive are designed to bridge those final disparities between a dedicated in-vehicle nav system and a smartphone app. It’s added spoken street names, the ability to tailor your route, multitasking capabilities and a lot more 3D. Here’s a video of our interview for the details:

After our talk I tested out the latest version of the Drive software — a beta for Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices called Drive+ — using the new Lumia 822 offered by Verizon Wireless for a few trail runs in the city and in a weekend trip to Wisconsin. I even pitted it against the in-dash nav system in my father-in-law’s minivan. I have to say, the experience was far better with Drive+ than with any other smartphone-based navigation system I’ve used.

First off, to fully utilize Drive+ you need to download map files from Here servers. These are no dinky files and you only select the geographies you plan to use. The map of California, for instance, is more than 200 MB, and the app requires you to make those transfers over Wi-Fi (so don’t wait until you’re in the car to set up the software). The maps are also vector-based, meaning it generates maps from data points rather than loading map images into your screen.

That not only makes the map flow on Drive practically seamless, but it also saves battery life and spares your data plan since the device isn’t constantly reaching out over its 3G or LTE radio to get the next set of map points. Most significantly, it allows Drive to function offline. If you lose your data connection, maps still works and it works well, as long as you can see GPS. I disabled the Lumia’s radios for 20 minutes and navigation continued to function without a single hitch.

I can’t emphasize how important that feature is if you truly want to use your phone as a vehicle nav system. A journey to some far-flung relative’s house in the boonies means I’m going to be driving out of 3G coverage quite regularly, which would render most phone-based nav systems useless. I was also impressed with by the Lumia’s ability to almost instantly capture and hold onto a GPS signal, though that’s more a function of hardware than the Drive software itself.

Nokia is also incorporating 3D across its mapping products, generated from laser arrays mounted on its mapping cars. I could find 3D constructs of every building in my neighborhood on Here.com though most of that information is stripped out in Nokia Drive. The nav software, however, does render a 3D image of your destination if available as well as other significant landmarks. It’s easy to see how this kind of technology could eventually be used to generate more user-friendly routes — instead of instructing a driver to turn left at 1^st Street, the app could tell him to turn left at the giant donut or the 7-Eleven.

It looks to me like Nokia’s ambitions for Drive go well beyond the smartphone and extend to the car dashboard. There are already automakers exploring this kind of bring-your-own-navigation business model. Chevy, for instance, plans to launch a nav app called BringGo, which lives in the smartphone but upon entering the car immediately projects itself into the on-dash monitor of its MyLink infotainment system. It wouldn’t be the a stretch for Nokia to do the same thing if it secures the right automaker partner.

Nokia already sells map data for nav systems through its Navteq division, and its key software partner Microsoft is a big player in the connected car OS space, powering Ford’s Sync system. In order for Drive to become an integrated connected car app, it would have to be platform agnostic, but Nokia is already moving in that direction. It launched its Here app for iOS last month and plans to do the same for Android in the first quarter. Here doesn’t have all of the features of Drive+, which is optimized for Nokia Lumia phones, or Drive, the version for other Windows Phone devices; but it could only be a matter of time.

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As more details emerged this week about Velocity, it’s becoming apparent that Sprint is playing the role of a systems integrator, buying the technologies of several connected car vendors and assembling them into a complete package for its automotive customers. So far it’s tapped Airbiquity, which has developed software that bridges smartphone and vehicle apps; Aeris Communications, an M2M connectivity platform designer; and WirelessCar, a telematics company specializing in automotive applications.

But Sprint spokesman Walter Fowler said the carrier has many partners it hasn’t yet announced, each helping handle a different Velocity component, from navigation to infotainment app development. What does Sprint bring to the table then? Well, one component is connectivity. As automakers start injecting their vehicles with more remote diagnostic and command control capabilities — such as monitoring of electric vehicle battery charges, or the ability to lock and unlock your doors from across the city – they’ll need embedded radio modules.

“Not only do we want to play that part in the U.S., we have the global relationships to make it work internationally,” Fowler said. But Sprint that’s only a small part what Sprint hopes to sell with Velocity, Fowler said. Connected car services will need to be provisioned, apps distributed, customers billed and developers managed. In many ways cars are like big phones, and Sprint is accustomed to managing networks of millions of phones. That expertise is what Sprint will ultimately sell to automakers, Fowler said, even if it means sacrificing the network connectivity contract.

Network agnosticism is a bold claim for a carrier, which typically measures its success in subscriptions. But Airbiquity VP of marketing Leo McCloskey said it was an inevitable step. While many cars will eventually have some kind of embedded connectivity, they’ll be the lowest order links — simple 2G modules providing baseline data for remote command and control apps. The real money will be will in the infotainment and advanced multimedia features hosted in the dash, which will require mobile broadband connections.

Though carriers like Verizon Wireless are still hoping that automakers will embed LTE in their vehicles, Detroit automakers and many of their international counterparts have adopted a bring-your-connectivity approach to those more advanced bandwidth-intensive features. And since car makers can’t control what smartphones their customers bring to their vehicles, they can’t control which networks will eventually connect their cars.

“This is going to be the biggest psychological jump carriers must take,” McCloskey said. “You can no longer care about who provides the connectivity.”

So far Sprint’s new approach seems to appeal to at least one automaker. Chrysler has committed to using Velocity in its UConnect Access system, the connected version of its UConnect infotainment platform, in the 2013 Ram 1500 pickup and in the new STR Viper testosterone wagon. This isn’t just a bare-bones system either. Wired Autopia got to play with the new vehicles, finding everything from remote lock/unlock and engine start, 911 assist and Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities, web-connected vehicle navigation and cloud-connected voice command and control functions – all connected back to a tethered smartphone.

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At the SAE Convergence conference, RIM’s software subsidiary QNX unveiled the new software developer kit (SDK) for its forthcoming connected car application platform, which QNX simply calls Car 2. The platform is an extension of RIM’s BlackBerry WebWorks HTML5 framework, so a developer building an app for the BlackBerry 10 platform could use the exact same HTML and JavaScript tools to create apps for Car 2.

Emulating the smartphone development environment, QNX plans to expose connected car application programming interfaces (APIs) such as to GPS and navigation, car stereo and multimedia functions and even the climate control systems. Finally, QNX plans to launch the equivalent of App World for the car – a central marketplace where developers can upload their apps and buyers can purchase them.

The big difference: in the case of the connected car, those buyers aren’t car owners. They’re the automakers. Because of safety issues of a device platform moving at 60 mph, all connected car platform makers are putting up a lot more barriers between developer and consumer.

While the policy makes sense, as highly distracting apps could cause highway accidents, it’s also slowed the pace of development in cars to a crawl. Most connected car platforms out there only have a handful of apps, and for the most part automakers have leaned toward audio streaming apps like Pandora and Stitcher, as well as navigation and mapping services.

Still, by creating a development platform that bridges the smartphone and car infotainment worlds, RIM is making it easier for potential developer partners to experiment in the connected car space. And while RIM’s fortunes are declining in the smartphone market, QNX is still a powerhouse in automotive. Its software powers the infotainment, instrument and telematics systems of over 200 makes and models of vehicles.

Car 2 is meant to be the next generation of its automotive strategy, opening up its software to a much larger development community and creating a much more powerful platform for apps and services. On Tuesday, RIM also announced it was working with Nvidia to integrate the latter’s Tegra processors into Car 2-based infotainment systems.

BlackBerry developers hoping to take a crack at Car 2 will have to wait a little longer though. The platform itself will debut among automakers in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter of 2013, RIM will launch the app marketplace and make the SDK available to “qualified” developers. There’s no word yet if it plans to open up the program to all comers.

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GM’s Chevrolet will be the first car manufacturer to use the API,with plans to build a custom version of the Stitcher user interface for MyLink in its newest Sonic and Spark models. Stitcher was one of the app pioneers in the connected car, boasting direct integration with Ford, BMW and Mercedes’ in-dash infotainment platforms.

The problem with many of those connected car implementations is that each requires custom development work for each platform supported, making updating apps and features a pain in the neck. For instance, new content such as the new Election Center Stitcher created for the political season require not only updates to the Android and iPhone apps, but also a custom reconfiguration of the software in all of its dashboard applications.

But by extending its service to carmakers through an API, that process is greatly simplified, a spokesperson for Stitcher said. Any app updates automatically replicate themselves in the connected car platform, and allows the automaker can more easily map dash and voice command controls onto Stitcher functions, she said.

The issue of fragmentation is going to become an increasingly big problem in the auto industry as the trend is for every automaker to put out their own proprietary systems. Platforms like Ford’s AppLink and Cadillac’s CUE are both ambitious initiatives, but so far they host only a handful of third-party apps.

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