Time was, the only cars you’d see at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas were the ones in the parking lots of the various conference venues. As the show has grown however, so have the technological ambitions of the world’s motoring manufacturers.
Today, many of the world’s big car makers jostle with more traditional tech players and well-funded startups for office space in Silicon Valley and we care as much about how well our cars interact with our personal tech as we do horsepower, handling and safety.
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Small wonder then that car makers have an increasingly large presence at the enormous electronics expo and that so many tech companies are trying to muscle their way into the motoring space.
Last year saw Audi stealing headlines with its innovative in-car cockpit and exquisite LaserLight concept, as did the partnership between Samsung and BMW.
So what do car geeks have to look forward to this year?
1. Merc’s possibly autonomous egg-shaped concept
Mercedes-Benz has always been one of the top players when it comes to motoring technology, with a raft of technologies we now consider commonplace originating in various incarnations of the S-Class. It therefore seems like a pretty good fit for CES.
That said, its technological pedigree does mean it’ll have to introduce something pretty special and by the looks of things, it plans to do just that. We don’t know much about the car just yet, but we do know that it’s egg-shaped and that it may well be autonomous. A sign of things to come for the S-Class? Maybe.
Read more: Is Merc about to unveil an egg-shaped autonomous concept?
2. BMW’s new obsession with lights
BMW first introduced the world to its Laserlight system with the i8. As headlights go, it’s a pretty innovative system too: at up to 600 metres, the range of BMW laser lighting is more than twice that of conventional headlights.
At CES this year, the Munich-based marque will unveil the next step in Laserlight’s evolution by linking it up to cameras, sensors and driver assistance systems, something which it says will open up the prospect of numerous new functions in the future.
Of course, it won’t be all about the lights. A new and improved version of BMW’s ConnectedDrive will also be on display.
3. A chip that could change motoring and gaming at the same time
The Nvidia Tegra X1 isn’t something that’s likely to get most motoring enthusiasts excited, but it has the potential to be very important.
Boasting eight 64-bit processing cores, 256 GPU cores and compatibility with a slew of modern desktop processing and gaming standards, the Tegra X1 is the fastest mobile processing unit ever made and is also the first mobile chip to break the one teraflop processing power barrier.
Inserted into a smartphone or tablet, it will enable you to play the kind of games that specialist gaming computers would’ve battled with just a couple of years ago. In your car meanwhile, it could be used to power autonomous driving systems, as well as in-car entertainment.
Read more: Nvidia Tegra X1 ‘superchipâ€
4. Parrot’s very clever in-dash system
Right now, the biggest battle in car tech is between Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto with even the carmakers seemingly battling to decide whether to support one, the other, or both. But now, thanks to Parrot, there is a third way and you won’t even have to buy a new car to use it.
The RNB6, which comes with a built-in dash cam, also includes navigation, voice controls, hands-free telephony, and on-board diagnostics. It may seem like a side-bar right now but if Parrot can push forward the idea of OS agnosticism, then it could seriously benefit from it.
5. The 2016 Cheverolet Volt
Oh wait, nope. Cheverolet actually decided to give the press and the press alone a sneak peek at the new Volt, before pulling it back behind the curtain. The full reveal will happen in Detroit in a few days’ time.
