Perhaps the biggest gadget show smartphone of the year globally is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held every January in Las Vegas in the USA.
This year there was a bigger automotive presence than ever before with some world debuts from both the car makers and tech giants. The future appears to be all about connectivity, whether that’s the driver and passengers connected to the car via Apple’s swanky new CarPlay system, or the car connected to others like it in a bid to reduce congestion and increase safety.
Audi even revealed its production ready traffic light interface system, which is in constant communication with the traffic lights in its immediate vicinity in a bid to reduce the amount of time the car is at a standstill. It does this by controlling the car’s speed so there is less wasteful decelerating and accelerating. This saves fuel and is just one example of how autonomous technology is coming closer and closer to reality. How long it is before fully driverless cars hit the showroom is anyone’s guess though, as legislation is a bigger hurdle than the technology itself.
Irish car buyers aren’t too bothered about it according to the Carzone.ie survey. A full 35.9% of respondents have no knowledge of autonomous car technology, 29.9% are undecided on its usefulness and 14% think it’s a bad idea. That leaves just 20.1% that firmly think it’s a good idea. Funnily enough, that’s the same proportion of those surveyed that believe cars don’t have quite enough technology in them. Most (52.7%) think there’s just enough.
A surprising 51.7% of all respondents said they have already bought or would buy a car based on the gadgets and technology fitted to it and a large proportion of those surveyed already use in-car tech such as satnav and Bluetooth. It’s worth analysing this data alongside the age of the respondents. There’s a notable increase in the ownership of a satnav system by drivers as they reach their mid-thirties, perhaps reflecting the cost of these devices and higher disposable income.
The opposite is true for iPods and other music devices, as a much larger proportion of younger drivers were found to use them in the car. The trend reverses again for mobile phones and Bluetooth, as it appears that, the older a driver gets, the more likely he/she is to have such things. It will be interesting to observe changes in this section over the next couple of years as technology becomes ever more prevalent. Carzone.ie’s own iPad App has seen tremendous growth over the past 12 months, with 26 per cent more visits to the App than before.