Sweden’s wireless car reaches 10 million global sales for its connected car offering
Sweden’s WirelessCar has confirmed that sales of vehicles equipped with its connected car technology have passed 10 million.
Founded in 1999, the company works with OEMs in the automotive industry to install digital vehicle services in newly built vehicles, using connected hardware functionality.
Greg Geiselhartvice president of sales and marketing at WirelessCar, said: “Reaching ten million connected cars worldwide is no small feat.
“Over the years, we have overcome both technical and commercial challenges, large and small, to deliver robust and highly reliable services to our customers. We bring that vast experience to the benefit of current and potential OEMs as we launch best-in-class connected cars. services.
“Obviously, we wouldn’t be where we are today without this accumulated knowledge from having ten million cars on the road!”
Swedish car giant Volvo became WirelessCar’s first customer in 2000. The two companies worked together to build an emergency call and safety service – Volvo On Call – that still operates today, albeit with the addition of a modern smartphone-enabled app.
Indeed, the automotive industry was forced to adapt quickly to the rapid proliferation of new connectivity protocols and intelligent algorithms available to optimize and protect their fleets.
Over the past 12 years or so, WirelessCar has strived to keep track of the revolving door of technological development in the connected car. Its expansion has seen new offices opened in the US and China and its partnerships now include BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, in addition to still working with Volvo.
The rise of public cloud services allowed more functions to be provided, for example, while microservice architectures and new IP communications such as 5G allow data relays with reduced latency.
Just like Volvo On Car, safety is a big draw for these new systems. With the latest wave of IoT systems, these security features have been strengthened. For example, GPS tracking is now often embedded to prevent theft, with connected systems used by the police to recover the stolen vehicle.
Despite the pace of technological change, WirelessCar has argued that car manufacturers should avoid replacing connected software “once every few years”.
In a blog post from October 2021, the company wrote said: “Over time, the automaker could end up with multiple connected car clouds, spread across generations of cars,”
“This provides a very different backend solution, one that adds unnecessary complexity to the business but no major benefits.
“Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make the production and development of new connected car services smoother and more cost-effective.”