I don’t really get the appeal of connected cars. In the car when you’re driving, you don’t want to be distracted, so why would you need an extra data plan on top of your smartphone plan for a car? Doesn’t that get expensive?
We are pioneers in the connected-car space and are ahead of our time in spotting the trend that all cars will have connectivity in the future. Car manufacturers all want connectivity because that’s the easiest and fastest way to update the software. The days of having to take your vehicle to a dealer to update maps are long gone.
Tesla is one of the more aggressive manufacturers when it comes to updating the software in their vehicles over-the-air, which all manufacturers are moving to. When the car breaks down what happens to the car? Did the battery go dead? They can also track the history of what happens to the car for diagnostics.
From the user’s point of view, there isn’t an autonomous driving vehicle that’s not connected that I know of. How you interact with the autonomous driving vehicle is with a smartphone. All cars will have an autonomous driving feature, so you can talk to the car while using your smartphone.
We added 800,000 connected cars in the fourth quarter of 2014 alone. That is pretty significant.