Lars Reger (NXP Semiconductors Germany GmbH):

Low cost telematics - connected cars become reality in the mass market

For more than 10 years there has been a strong interest of the automotive industry and end customers on Telematic Solutions. Although most of the car drivers would like to use features like Emergency Call, Intelligent Traffic Management, Stolen Vehicle Tracking and Remote Diagnosis, a deployment to the mass market has failed to appear up to now.

Until today the main issue is the pricing of the available solutions. Car manufacturers are helping themselves by using products that connect the vehicle to the outside world via the mobile phone of the driver.

However, such systems often have weaknesses concerning availability, robustness and reliability. The main goal of the industry should be to enable significant price reductions for in-built Telematic Systems.

Integrated chipsets, focussing on volume markets will be the basis to reaching the cost targets over the next years. Main savings will be achieved by reductions in development and qualification effort, bill of material, production costs and external components.