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Vehicle antenna is a conduit to the Internet age
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UK-BASED Laird Plc, which specializes in telematics components that make vehicles more connected, opened its new US$5.5 million plant in Shanghai last week.
With annual manufacturing capacity of 20 million units, the plant will be the company’s biggest telematics center for the next 10 years and will lead in the production of a new concept, the smart antenna, which can increase the deployment of cellular communications and vehicle-to-vehicle communications with a higher data rate.
At the plant’s opening ceremonies, Shanghai Daily talked with David Lockwood, chief executive officer of Laird, about how smart we can expect cars to become with enhanced connectivity.
Q: How does Laird see the Internet of Things as a hot-button topic? How far are we away from achieving that vision?
A: The Internet of Things has been available for a long time. In a domestic house, for example, you are able to control heating from your phone, but no one does that because people don’t want to live like that. It is not a technology issue for me. It is a behavioral issue. The Internet of Things is just a new name for use of wireless Internet. I don’t think it will be a big bang. If there is a change, it will be a much gentler evolution. Investors are always looking at the dotcom boom, those big things that can help them make 10 times more money. But the world is not like that.
Q: What kind of business model would you consider best for vehicle telematics?
A: I think some simple things will be mandated, such as e-call for safety help in Europe. It is like a commodity now, like the flashing yellow light you get when a car breaks down.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communications will be helpful for people, particularly in cities, to manage traffic flows. But that will require standards, which means every car company will have to put the exact compatible system in place. There needs to be a lot of cooperation between governments and carmakers. It will take at least 6 to 10 years.
And there are more issues to be resolved, like who pays for the fixed infrastructure and who pays for the mobile infrastructure. The insurance issue also is a big one. A car company once talked to us about an idea they have and the liability concerns for making it possible.
The idea was that when you have a flat tire, a warning would show up on the dashboard, then go out through the antenna into the company’s cloud service system, which would then send you information on the nearest garage where a replacement tire is available. It would say, for example, that you are safe to run 50 kilometers to the garage.
After your route comes in, the garage would track your arrival and change your tire when you arrive, like in Formula One.
But what if someone else had a tire available just 20 kilometers away? Or between 20 and 50 kilometers, you crashed because your tire was running flat? Whose problem is that? The applications are quite easy to understand. Car companies can differentiate their services on smart antenna Internet things, but there are lots of things to get through.
Q: Speaking of risk management, there are growing concerns that the more connected the car becomes, the more vulnerable it is to being hacked. What’s your opinion on that?
A: At the moment, very few cars put safety critical information out over the antenna. All the hackers can do now via antenna is to turn your radio off. If you want to integrate engine management into it, then that is a big deal.
Vehicles today are similar to what a computer was before the Internet age, for being a stand-alone product. But someday, the car is going to become the same way as the computer, with a system accessible from anywhere.
Once you put all those wireless technologies in place to prevent hacking, it has to be about architecture. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications, also called dedicated short-range communications, are doing that upfront by putting security and authentication standards in place.
Smart antennas, where antenna and radio are integrated into one unit, make security easier because they simplify the architecture. As a rule of thumb, the more complicated the architecture is, the easier it is to hack.
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