On June 25 and 26 in San Francisco, California will be the annual Google I/O Conference where they will talk about the latest version of the Android Operating System to smartwatches to Android Wear to driverless cars – and somewhere in between those topics, Google will unveil its Google Play Link to interface with an automobile dashboard, according to NVIDIA…which makes the hardware and firmware for the system.
It was back in January that Google announced the creation of the Open Automotive Alliance, a Google led consortium that includes Audi AG, General Motors Co., Honda Motor Co., Hyundai Motor Group and chipmaker NVIDIA Corp. Google’s sole intent for arranging this group is to bring the Android OS to cars in 2014. Everybody knows that this will intensify the race between Google Play Link and Apple’s own CarPlay – with each one vying to be the king of the hill in dashboard computing.
Google’s system will offer controls through the steering wheel or smartphone and is used for – I love this word – Infotainment, such as mapping and music, although the Tegra chips are capable of much more, including driver assistance. This means steering, parallel parking, systems to avoid collisions, and even more.
Roger Lanctot, associate director of the Global Automotive Practices for research firm Strategy Analytics said, “Nvidia [is] being used for safety systems – that’s the beginning of a big industry shift. Google wants to be in the car but they want to control those implementations. They don’t want forks of Android, like Amazon’s Fire OS.” There are already about 5 million cars on the road right now with NVIDIA chips, but none of those are being used for driving assistance features.
Even with all of Google’s driverless car advancements, it will be years before we see those kinds of leaps on the actual road. For now, manufacturers are content with parallel parking assistance or cars that park themselves. The Google Auto Link is the first product to come out of the Google-NVIDIA partnership, however, it will be used as the operating system for the infotainment system…but it is nice to know that the NVIDIA chips are capable of doing so much more ‘down the road.’
Please hit us up on our Google+ Page and let us know if you are excited about the Google Play Link…as always, we would love to hear from you.