Category: Motor Industry

“The car is an island, isolating its user,” said Claudio San Pedro, senior vice president of the Fiat Business Line, Fiat Auto, in Italy. “To change that, we are aligning our cars with technology as used in homes and offices.” Owners of Fiat’s Stilo model, a moderately priced hatchback, can use the optional Connect service to make phone calls and either listen to a voice recite their e-mail messages or read them directly on a screen. “Even while driving, you can also look at the Web, but we do not recommend it,” San Pedro said.

That option and other features available in Europe and Japan make auto executives in the United States shudder. They say they must worry about lawsuits rather than whether their customers can order from Amazon while driving. “In the United States, driver distraction is a bigger thing than in Europe,” said Norbert Seitner, head of product planning for Audi North America. “People in America tend to sue companies very easily,” he added, if something goes wrong with the technology.

That is why many car navigation systems in the United States display terms and conditions on the screen before they can be used, a requirement not found in other markets.

Safety first Besides nervousness over lawsuits, the American auto market has also been more cautious in offering features like television or karaoke, which are widely available in other countries. Some features will probably not be available here for years, if ever.

Executives contend that most American drivers are more interested in advanced safety systems than in entertainment options.

In Europe, TV fanatics do not have to worry about missing their favorite shows. In many Audi models sold there, drivers can use the same screen that powers the navigation system to watch broadcast television. Yet even with a feature that shuts off the video once a car moves faster than three miles an hour, Audi has no intention of offering it here.

Fear of legal action has also stopped Toyota from offering its Intelligent Parking Assist feature, which is now available on the hybrid gas-electric Prius model sold in Japan. This device automatically parks the car, maneuvering the Prius backward and into the space. To activate it, the driver first pulls alongside the forward vehicle, then drags a picture of a flag marker and parking triangle on the car’s touch-screen display, until they are positioned where the vehicle should wind up. But the system cannot respond to changing conditions, like the vehicle in front suddenly backing into the space the Prius is about to enter. Nor can the system respond to unexpected road obstacles–a soccer ball rolling into the gutter or a child running in the way.

While the system seems ideal for congested streets like New York’s, “we have no plans for the U.S.,” said Jon Bucci, corporate manager for advanced technology at Toyota Motor Sales.

It is not just fear of lawsuits that prompts different gear for different markets. Terrorism has also created a switch in what consumers deem to be necessary equipment as they drive. It is the ability to communicate, not to be entertained, that seems to matter most to Americans, some industry officials have concluded.

“Safety and security are our winning features,” said Terry Sullivan, vice president of communications for OnStar, the communications system owned by General Motors and available on 50 of its models as well as those of other manufacturers. “While customers can hear their e-mail using OnStar’s Virtual Advisor service, the number that do is minuscule, in the low thousands,” Sullivan said. “More telling is that 80 percent of its 2.7 million customers buy the air-bag notification system, which sends a signal to a central office when a car’s air bag is deployed, to dispatch emergency services.

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Moreover, key decision makers and stakeholders—competitors, government agencies, the media, attorneys, current and former employees, and suppliers—are increasingly listening and referring to these online discussion communities for real-time insights.

Today, nearly 75% of consumers cite word-of-mouth recommendations as the most influential factor in their car-buying . In the space of a few short years, the Internet has evolved into a useful medium for particular kinds of commerce. After the dot-com hype of the 1990s, several car-buying Web sites emerged as some of the most popular of all Web destinations for consumers.

In addition to these quasi-official sites for information and opinions about vehicles, a parallel universe of Internet communities also sprang up where consumers freely shared information and informal opinions about all phases of the automotive experience—new-car attributes and drawbacks, subjective accounts about ownership, comparisons of competing vehicles, anticipation about new models, safety issues, product recalls, service problems, launch glitches and hassles with dealers.

These online communities, populated almost exclusively by consumers who love to talk about their cars, trucks and SUVs, have become an increasingly legitimate, albeit unstructured, source of car-related information in the eyes of all potential consumers.

Quite inevitably, this vast new storehouse of highly believable, unsolicited, unstructured information has begun to exercise huge infl uence on consumers’ behavior.

Left unmonitored and unchecked, these free-form and unstructured Internet discussions can both boost and harm automotive companies’ brand images, loyalty and satisfaction levels, product-quality perceptions, sales and profi ts.

As this paper will explore, these influential consumers, and the consumers and stakeholders they infl uence, are directly affecting the bottom lines of automotive manufacturers and dealers.

Of consumers who purchased a 2001 or 2002 vehicle, nearly 20% participated in online discussion groups before buying (Source: JD Power & Associates).

Consumers continue to rely on car companies and the automotive media for updated product information, auto reviews and new-model information, but more and more of them are looking to the Internet to narrow their choices and evaluate their options.

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Covisint Inc., the company that provides business-to-business services to help automotive makers electronically communicate with partners and suppliers, on Thursday launched a new messaging service.

The Covisint Connect data messaging service provides the means for a company to exchange information with partners and suppliers using XML, rather than EDI [electronic data interchange]. Connect also provides an any-to-any translation capability that works with both XML and EDI. The Connect service was developed—and funded—by a group of major automotive makers and suppliers, including General Motor Company, DaimlerChrysler AG, Johnson Controls Inc., Delphi Corp. and Lear Corp. A number of those companies are part of the Covisint automotive consortium that includes DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., GM, Renault S.A., Nissan Motor Co.

The aim of Connect is to create an industry standard that will provide an across-the-board approach to information exchange in the automotive industry, officials said. A key piece to move that initiative forward is the group’s establishment of Business Object Documents, or BODs, standard formats for the most commonly-used transaction documents. Covisint, with the Connect consortium members, developed six BODs that look to represent a large number of the current-data messaging volume, officials said. Those BODs have been submitted to the AIAG [Automotive Industry Action Group] for publication.

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BMW, in particular, has gravitated to Microsoft systems, although the company has announced wins with Honda, Volvo and others as well.

Microsoft has kept its car talk to a dull roar in recent months, but is expected to talk more about its effort in January, when Chairman Bill Gates delivers a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Microsoft is just one of many companies offering an operating system for use in automotive electronics, competing against QNX Software Systems, Wind River and Linux makers, among others.

As of this summer, analysts said the company had just about 10 percent of the market for in-car electronics, an industry that itself has fallen short of early estimates. Only about 13 percent to 14 percent of cars are connected to a network today, Magney said, although other cars have systems for navigation or entertainment.

The latest version of its Windows for Automotive software supports Bluetooth connections, allowing in-car systems to tap the power of a cell phone to access information.

More info: [url=http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5111932.html]http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5111932.html[/url]