Volkswagen calls for standard in-car technologies

Exploring Ultra Mobile PCs for streaming video and music

Volkswagen wants to work with fellow car manufacturers to drive the entertainment technology standards used in cars in the future. 

It is exploring how it can use handheld products, such as Ultra Mobile PCs, with its own in-car systems to wirelessly transfer audio and video media, and get online to sites such as internet radio.

Currently, car manufacturers feel that technology moves too fast for vehicle makers. While different standards, such as those backed by Apple or Microsoft for digital music, are accepted by consumers, car makers want a single way of offering entertainment across vehicles, so that people are not locked into a vehicle make or back a technology with a shorter lifetime than the car itself.

Parag Jain, senior project engineer at Volkwagen of America’s Connectivity and Computing Electronics Reseach Laboratory, said it was exploring UMPCs because they are devices it believes will be carried around and used in the home.

The demo version on show at the Intel Developer Forum used wifi to get online and to connect to the UMPC, but Jain said he was considering Bluetooth as the connectivity technology.

And he was unsure whether cars would come with a broadband connection, mainly because he did not believe consumers would willingly pay for two services - one at home and one for the car.

He now wants car makers to start calling the shots with such technology, rather than following what technology manufacturers produce, as is currently the case. “We’re getting to the point of chaos [by playing a follow up role] and that’s why we feel car companies should get together and reach a decision.”

And he said such systems would not rely solely on UMPCs, but would also include in-car storage, or connections with mobile phones with entertainment capabilities, laptops or PDAs.

“What is missing is the way that they talk to the car and that’s what we want to influence.”

In VW’s demo with the UMPC, Jarin showed the in-car system passing information between the two, such as mapping, music and video.

If video, the driver can choose to pump different programmes to the two headrest mounted screens for the rear seat passengers, while choosing an internet radio station for themselves.