According to market analysts, cars can process up to 25 gigabytes of data per hour; this potential is expected to increase. The information and multimedia content is huge and increasingly relevant to traffic, climate, road conditions and traffic jams, but above all to driving habits.
In the next years vehicles will be mainly focused on the telematic box, a device connecting to mobile communication networks, a geolocation device (GPS) and an accelerometer. Combining functions of these three elements the position, driving speed and braking “style”, road conditions and road traffic status can be detected and information transmitted. The black box in the car can result in several advantages, depending on its application. Uses can be manifold.
Above all, however, equipping the car with a black box could become compulsory by 2022: if the new European Parliament, soon to be elected, were to confirm the provisions of an existing agreement concerning a bundle of measures to promote road safety, then cars, vans and lorries would have to be equipped with a number of new devices, including a black box to record speed, acceleration, driving style and all the data relating to what happened immediately before and after a car collision.
Up to now, the insurance companies have been the forerunners for telematic boxes, offering their customers the opportunity to obtain rebates when choosing to install a “black box”. Today the machines can have up to 4 telematic boxes installed and many models can be produced with the manufacturer’s telematic box giving (to the manufacturer) a whole series of data regarding functioning, consumption, polluting particles emissions and the like.
Mandatory regulations could provide a further boost in this respect: with just one system, smart and even-handed, to collect all the data needed by the players involved (the driver, the manufacturer, the lender, the insurance company), is no doubt a more effective solution and paves the way ahead for many other functions to be developed.
According to Nicola Lavenuta, CEO Macnil GTAlarm, the Zucchetti Group company focused on the development of M2M and IoT projects: ” A great number of future-oriented possibilities open up when using such systems. In our R&D departments we are working on a range of opportunities to take advantage and upgrade their features. By providing telematic boxes with payment interfaces, for example, it will be possible to pay quickly and automatically for parking lots and motorways, as well as for fueling and gas stations. Moreover, considering the increasingly widespread e-commerce system, whereby the delivery of what has been purchased is one of its challenges, in our labs we are devising solutions for opening the luggage compartment of the car to be offered, safely for all, to e-tailers to allow them a further service to be rendered”.
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