About 80 percent of India’s car sales are compact vehicles in the A and B segments, placing a premium on “frugal innovation” to meet Indian consumers’ demand for cost-effective connectivity. Talking to industry publication Automotive World (AW), Visteon’s Arun Devaraj discussed the importance of providing brought in connectivity over embedded car systems in a market where costefficiency is paramount.
In an article published in AW’s quarterly magazine, Devaraj, India customer regional engineering (CRE) lead, highlights the importance of leveraging the capabilities of broughtin devices in emerging markets where smartphones and USBs often are the primary source of connectivity. Smartphones – or other broughtin connectivity – enables “frugal innovation” for infotainment, as it minimizes automakers' need to invest in embedded systems, which can impact the overall cost of a vehicle’s purchase price.
Click here to read the Automotive World article in full.
Noting that it’s highly probable that, from now on, every new car buyer in India will have a smartphone, Devaraj advocates using the computing power of the driver’s smartphone or USB device to bring information into the vehicle. Mirroring systems, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, can provide connected features similar to highend embedded infotainment systems, while voice recognition and navigation, for example, can be brought into the car so the automaker doesn’t need to invest as much into the head unit to offer similar content to the end user.