Your next car could feature upgrades that will make it feel more like a phone

10 January 2024 , 20:53

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Cars are starting to feel more like phones (Image: QUALCOMM)

The days of filling up with petrol, putting your car into gear and manually tuning the radio are firmly in the rearview mirror, with tech taking over all aspects of modern and future cars. Over the past few years, we've seen the rapid expansion of screens, the reduction of buttons and a sense that you're going to be driving your car less and less, because the car is going to be driving itself.

Many owners already take it for granted that their car will stream music from Spotify and in some - like the Tesla Model 3 - you can watch Netflix movies while you charge. In many ways, your car is already copying the features that your smartphone offers and some of that comes down to the tech that's now powering them.

It might not surprise you that one of the companies that powers many modern phones is also powering many modern cars. Qualcomm has loads of tech that car companies can use to control things from the entertainment screens, through to the safety systems in a vehicle. In a clever demo seen by Mirror Online at CES 2024, Qualcomm also showed off how an AI voice assistant can open up pages of the car manual and even diagnose faults so you know what needs to be fixed at the garage.

That's on top of fun features like being able to fully customise the display, which is now powered by the Unreal Engine, the same graphics software used for computer games like Fortnite. What's important for all the features - and the reason that Qualcomm is involved - is because of the increased demand for computing power.

Qualcomm provides the chips that power a lot of the car's functions, taking advantage of that long experience in smartphones and other connected devices. The advantage this brings to the car itself is that things can happen faster, and the sort of processing needed for all the sensors and cameras on a self-driving car is easily within reach of modern hardware.

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While a lot of this tech makes the experience better, there's also a side effect: the reduction of buttons. Just like a smartphone, when you remove them there are fewer moving parts to break, but you're also not restricted to that single function that a button once offered. The flipside - and something that drivers complain about - is not having a button to press to adjust the heating for example, leaving you digging around in menus on the screen.

Cars are getting more sophisticated and companies like Qualcomm are providing the tech to make that happen - and it's already in use from manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Volvo. So next time you get into a high-tech car, you'll know that it's basically a giant smartphone.

Dave Snelling