The big thing for carmakers today is how your vehicle stays connected

When I was a young man, I used to sneak away in my mother’s Maruti 800 on more than a couple of occasions. If my mother knew what all I did to her car or in her car, she wouldn’t have been happy. But every morning, it would be parked outside the house, without anyone’s information about how it had spent the night. And I’m sure parents today worry about their teenage sons and daughters sneaking away in the family car just like I used to do. But you see, now parents have an interesting new tool to manage their teenage delinquency through technology. As cars are increasingly becoming moving computers, it was almost obvious that they would get connected to the internet of things, so say hello to telematics.

The big thing for manufacturers nowadays is providing an app for your smartphone to connect to your car. These applications can give you all sorts of alerts straight from your car to your phone. And these are not just your standard ‘your fuel is running low’ systems such the new Mercedes Me, Suzuki Connect and Hyundai Blue link among others can alert you to a whole host of things much to your young son’s or daughter’s chagrin. For example, most of these apps have a geofencing alert, that is, you get an alert if your car leaves a particular radius from what you have set. So if you have set a 10 km radius around your house and your car leaves that zone, your phone will ping. There are speed alerts as well, so when your son comes home and claims he didn’t cross 50, you might even have the evidence. The telematic apps are paired directly to your phone and the cars on-board diagnostics system and are transmitted using a e-SIM card, so data will not get corrupted and while a teenager might have the need to lie, why would a car lie?

The fact is that if I was a teenager today, I would be very unhappy with all this tech. But then again, this tech also has several positive safety and security features. On the Hyundai Blue link system on the new Venue (and other cars), you can immobilise your car remotely if it has been stolen (or snuck away by your daughter). All telematic systems give you near real-time locations and driving information. There are some privacy concerns that I have about how the information — can car companies share this information with the government without my consent or knowledge? Mercedes-Benz India says their new Mercedes-Me system complies with European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GPDR) norms to maintain your privacy which cannot be violated without a court warrant. It would be helpful if other manufacturers came out with such statements as well.

The good thing about many of these new telematic solutions is that some of them are compatible  backwards with previous generation models as well. Suzuki Connect currently available on Nexa vehicles can be retrofitted to older Nexa cars as well, and the Mercedes-Me system can be fitted on almost all Mercedes-Benz cars sold from 2007 onwards.

This was almost inevitable in modern life. Two decades ago, I might have said, ‘if only cars could talk, the stories they would tell.’ Well, technology and mobile networks have given your car the ability to talk, well at least, tell you where they are and how they’re being treated.

(For your car queries and questions, ping Kushan on Twitter @kushanmitra)