Technology is a fast-moving industry that touches virtually every area of our lives – and it’s only set to get bigger and more influential. Autonomous cars, drones and the Internet of Things are just three of the buzzier terms being lauded as the next big things we’ll all be buying into.
With the Consumer Electric Show (CES) taking place recently in Las Vegas, there are lots of promising bits of technology on the horizon. We take a look at the main contenders and raise some of the practical questions that will need to be asked by fleet managers and those considering using these new tools in their businesses.
Some people doubt that this is the year that will be a breakthrough in tech. There’s a view that although there’s a lot of potentially ground-breaking ideas, there’s a lack of products that are consumer ready. But using this year to discover how customers use new productswill help to develop them and make them better.
Nevertheless, CES is all about what will be available for us to buy in the future. It covers a huge range of goods – just a few of the items include car fleets, fridges, hoverboards, hidden wearables and much more in between.
As technology, the Internet of Things and our relationship with smart devices develops, it’s safe to say that the list below will start to affect us in the near future at some scale.
Cars
There’s been a lot of talk around self-driving cars, and with Google’s silicon valley prototypes zipping around already, they’re not far off (they think that they’ll be able to bring them to market in the next four years).
Last week at CES, autonomous vehicles were on the agenda in a big way. Among the brands further along in development, Kia introduced autonomous model Drive Wise, announcing that all of their future autonomous driving services will be badged under the Drive Wise banner.
Testing will begin on public roads in Nevada, with a plan to introduce and go into production by 2030, a date many tech experts have hailed as an achievable time to get autonomous cars on the road.
But what does this mean for your fleet? Or your drive into work? For one, you can forget about the boredom induced by long car journeys. Infotainment (information and entertainment) systems and high definition screens are going to become commonplace. The software contained within cars is also advancing fast – soon they’ll be filled with touch screens, intelligent sound systems and permanently connected to the internet. In Drive Wise cars for example, hands-off cruise control, lane-keeping systems and fingerprint recognition will feature.
Drones
Let’s park cars and talk about something that’s barely scratched the surface in terms of the scope that’s possible. At CES alone there were more than 100 drone models on display, including one that could carry a person, and one that follows you using a wrist sensor. There’s potential to launch drones from moving cars or carry packages and fly like planes.
Here, possibilities for use in fleets are endless, from keeping track of traffic flow to cutting down on the number of cars needed to make deliveries. At the moment, many of the models are not at a stage where they could be mass produced or commercialised. And the hurdle here is to build infrastructure – if you think about how long it took to build unlimited data options into phone contracts, it starts to become clearer that a huge change like moving to drone delivery is a long process.
The Internet of Things
We’ve seen smart fridges at CES before, but this year they look far more promising than before, with screens that cover an entire door and attractive design.
The gradual move towards a world where every object in your home communicates with the others is happening. For example, there are now devices that connect your car to your home and tell you if you’ve left something behind. But this may have implications on your life in more ways than you might originally think.
Most car journeys, whether as part of a fleet or personal,could be called into question. Will you need to drive to the supermarket if your fridge and cupboards can do the shop for you? All of these possibilities call into question how useful the technology we really rely on now will be in the future.
Technology development will get faster and faster, and it’s important that we start to think ahead and plan how it will affect us, whatever our relationship with it.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Kia Fleet sponsor of the Guardian Small Business Network Accessing Expertise hub.
