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The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) in September 2016 announced a new Federal Automated Vehicles Policy “…to help facilitate the responsible introduction of automated vehicles to make transportation safer, cleaner, more accessible, and more efficient.” 

In a report dated September 29, 2016, Gartner shared “The production of new...

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CarForce, a Houston-based connected car company, has received funding from Digitech Venture Capital Fund, alongside technology incubator Seed Sumo and early Uber investor Jason Calacanis.

CarForce allows its vehicle dealership customers to seamlessly share their maintenance and safety data on its cloud-based platform. The company has developed a cloud-based SaaS solution that allows connected car telematics to provide dealerships with real-time updates on the health of their...

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Industrial IoT (IIoT) continues to garner most of the investment activity and generate most of the revenue in the space. In the instrumented construction equipment space, for example, the market is so mature that equipment users expect that predictive maintenance savings are already reflected in pricing.

Increasingly they also expect to be compensated for allowing the equipment supplier to make use of “their” data. Conversely, business models for consumer IoT...

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Vodafone has announced it is providing connectivity for the new Skoda Kodiaq, launched last week.

In a short news alert, the telco confirmed the Kodiaq will be equipped with a specialised SIM card, which keeps the vehicle connected to the Vodafone network and enables the vehicle’s driver to keep on top of various information, including whether the car is locked, its location, as well as automatically contacting the Skoda emergency call centre in the event of an accident.

The...

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MWC 2016 was  something of a watershed for the connected car. While the connected car arrived a few years ago, this year we saw that it is raring to go mainstream. Ford and Nissan had their own stands at the show and Jaguar was showing off the new F-Pace, its ‘most connected car to date’.

This is not a new trend, but notable was the fact that more and more firms who are not directly part of the automotive industry also featured vehicles on their stands. AT&T and...

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Remember when a car was just a car? The automotive industry was all about how fast, how far, how safe, and how reliable their cars were. And, they got very good at it, having decades of expertise in developing and promoting safety standards and performance benchmarks to ensure the safety – and loyalty – of their customers.

Enter the connected car. Now, the industry finds itself at a crossroads. The fact is, the connected car is here to stay, and as it is with virtually...

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Bosch has developed a new cloud-based driver warning system that alerts drivers within seconds if they are going in the wrong direction.

The system was designed in response to a study that found that nearly one-third of all wrong-way accidents took place within 500 metres of the vehicle entering the incorrect lane.

Conventional radio broadcasts often take minutes to warn the driver, which may often prove too late to prevent an accident. The new cloud-based warning system, on the...

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Big data technology firm INRIX has launched its new INRIX Road Weather service to provide critical road condition information to drivers in Europe and North America.

The new service provides information on road precipitation, surface condition visibility and other characteristics of the road itself, distinguishing itself from other conventional weather information solutions. It also provides road condition update alerts every 15 minutes.

INRIX Road Weather was developed by the...

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A patent from Google for a technology which enables self-driving cars to detect hand signals from cyclists has been released.

The patent, U.S. Patent 9,014,905, credits Henrik Kretzschmar and Jiajun Zhu as the inventors, and defines as its abstract: “Methods and systems for detecting hand signals of a cyclist by an autonomous vehicle are described.

“An example method may involve a computing device receiving a plurality of data points corresponding to an environment of an...

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IBM and Peugeot have announced a partnership to help better analyse data to deliver new services from connected vehicles.

The latest move, which builds upon the two firms’ partnership from last year for big data and analytics tools, aims to allow Peugeot to develop new business opportunities for a variety of industries, including automotive distribution, smarter cities, and retail. Financial terms of the seven-year deal were not disclosed.

The two companies also noted the importance of...

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The idea of the digital supercomputer car has been around since the 80’s. Characters like Knight Rider’s K.I.T.T had the ability to learn, communicate and even connect with Michael Knight on some emotional level, not bad for a Pontiac Trans Am.

While in the 80’s it seemed that the reality of an intelligent car was only for the magic of television, today we not only have intelligent cars, but are heading towards a future where your car can be your personal...

Telecommunications company Huawei has announced that it will be investing heavily in future infrastructure technologies as it prepares for the era of autonomous cars. Fifth generation mobile internet (5G) has been discussed as a solution to the substantial bandwidth requirements that vehicles are likely to require when communicating with other road-based objects. In a recent article on the Financial Times, Huawei CEO Eric Xu, revealed that talks with car manufacturers were already on the agenda. However, the discussions must still be at an early stage as Xu failed to disclose any specifics. Bandwidth capacity There is a worry that even...

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German car manufacturer Volkswagen (VW) has announced a new partnership with Inrix, a move that offers a glimpse at the type of data drivers will have at their fingertips over the coming years.

Inrix, a big data company that specialises in traffic information, analytics and driver services for connected cars and smart cities worldwide, will be offering VW access to its Inrix Park and Inrix Fuel services.

VW intends to use the Inrix products in its new European Passat models...