January’s international Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas gathered the usual heady mix of raw product launches and crystal-ball gazing. This year, automotive technology was at the fore, with a record number of car makers joining leading tech companies and consumer electronics manufacturers to announce new products and strategies in this rapidly developing market.
From laser-guided parking systems to cars which allow drivers to sign-in to their personal profiles, the latest automotive technology developments displayed at CES have thrown up several topics for legal debate that the car technology market will need to resolve.
Battle of the platforms
Technology and connectivity advancements combined with the backing of car manufacturers mean that the connected car is gaining mainstream attention. Similar to the battles between smartphone and tablet operating systems and those in other platform-reliant markets, such as pay television and console gaming, it seems inevitable that the connected car will become the battleground for the latest platform war.
Will auto manufacturers develop their own in-car platforms, or will they cede control and support Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, or perhaps both? Leading technology players such as Nvidia (with their superchips) are also developing important roles in the value chain, whilst mobile network operators are leveraging the importance of their data networks as always-on connectivity becomes increasingly critical.
Just like the smartphone wars, these battles will not only be fought in the showrooms – they will also be evident in merger and acquisition transactions. Prime automotive tech targets will include companies which innovate a product or service which is additive to the current offering of an existing platform; businesses that have existing user traction in adjacent markets; targets with valuable IP that can be repurposed for the provider’s use case, and talented teams with technical skill sets that can be redeployed within a provider’s organisation.
Is car technology safe?
Although media attention has recently focused on the safety issues associated with driverless cars, a more immediate concern arises from the volume of information now competing for the driver’s attention. Driver distractions are not new – they have existed since the advent of mobile phones – however, connected cars’ immediate, rich range of information will further divert the driver’s attention from the road.
Head-up displays, such as that currently being developed by Navdy, promise to keep the driver’s attention focused on the road ahead, and not on an HD dashboard or a smartphone screen. It should also be recognised that some information (such as speed warnings, and alerts as to nearby pedestrians or cyclists) may be provided specifically to improve the safety of drivers and other road-users.
But at what point do these technologies inundate the driver with data overload and cause unacceptable safety risks? It remains to be seen if this will become an ever-more common feature of personal injury litigation, and of prosecutions for careless or dangerous driving.
Regulation catching up with reality
One of the most-reported automotive events at CES was the autonomous Audi A7, which drove itself over 500 miles to the tradeshow from California to Nevada. Although these two US states are among the few to have passed legislation permitting autonomous cars, an Audi spokesman described how the car had to stop at the state line to switch licence plates because of their different legal requirements for these vehicles.
Autonomous cars may appear on EU roads sooner than in some US states, with a number of European countries having instigated an amendment in 2014 to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic permitting cars to drive themselves (as long as this can be overridden by the driver).
Car manufacturers developing autonomous vehicles will need international regulations to be sufficiently harmonised in order that those vehicles may be developed and manufactured at scale for an international market.
A flood of data
CES also showcased the latest products and services that will continue to generate data of considerable quantity and quality in respect of vehicles and their drivers. Examples of existing services that collect and utilise data from cars and drivers include:
- Insurethebox – a data-collection device positioned in the car that allows insurance companies to assess how safely people drive, by evaluating factors such as what time of day they drive and their speed on different roads.
- Zubie – a data key which can be inserted under the dashboard of many cars in order to connect the car to the cloud and extract a variety of data on the car’s health and activity, for display via Zubie’s app or for exploitation via the services of Zubie’s third party partners.
- Waze – a free navigation app which “gamifies” satellite navigation and provides a local community of users who can share real-time traffic and road information.
Although novel in their approach and delivery, these new data-collecting products raise some significant legal questions. Who will own the data that is generated and collected from them? Does this depend on the source of the data (for example low-level data generated by the vehicle itself as compared to stand-alone data collected by a smartphone app)? What happens to data when the driver doesn’t own the car which has collected it (for example, a car club rental)? Furthermore, from a data privacy perspective, any exploitation of data will need to be particularly carefully conducted where personal data has been collected.
Patents everywhere
Toyota announced at CES that it will share over 5000 patents related to hydrogen fuel cells, following Tesla’s release of electric vehicle patents in 2014. However, beyond these apparently generous acts, advances in automotive technology give rise to a number of other significant patent issues.
Many automotive innovations will be implemented in software, which can lead to difficulty in obtaining patent protection in Europe and potentially the US. Inventions which solve technical problems (e.g. collision avoidance, assisted parking) are more likely to be patentable, but where they simply relate to the user interface it may be much harder to obtain protection.
As a number of companies continue to file patent applications in an attempt to become leaders in automotive technology, it remains to be seen whether manufacturers and technology companies will begin to acquire other businesses specifically for their patent portfolios related to automotive technology.
It seems likely from CES 2015 that future cars will be more autonomous, more connected and more convenient to use than ever, but if technology is now taking the wheel, perhaps the legal world needs to figure out when to take the handbrake off.
Matthew Phillips is a partner at Olswang
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