China Social Networks ... in Cars?

The first time I heard of the Walkie-Talkie application as part of the InkaNet (as in in-car-net) service created by marketing company Pateo for the Roewe 350 in China, I assumed that it was for reporting traffic incidents. In fact, Walkie-Talkie was a social network for owners of InkaNet-equipped Roewe 350's (made by SAIC Motor in Shanghai) to communicate with other users of the same application driving the same car.

PHOTO: DiDi app in use in a Buick in China.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Who would want to do that?" But when I sat in a Roewe 350 and checked out the chatter during rush hour, it would appear that plenty of people, many of them driving cars, want to do this - ie. communicate with other drivers of the same car model). Even worse, if I recall correctly, many of the communications in the form of chatting exchanges were written and related to the news of the day - certainly nothing so urgent as traffic conditions or even the presence of speed traps or red light cameras, or even calls for assistance at crash scenes - something that OnStar's Good Samaritan service is capable of performing. (By the way, the chatting almost completely ceased after rush hour.)

Now comes news of yet another social application platform, called DiDi, in development at GM's Shanghai subsidiary. DiDi has been a project for more than a year and enables in car integration of a smartphone along with gesture and voice recognition (including speech to text for messaging) and touch screen access.

The initial iterations of DiDi showed simple chatting applications, not unlike InkaNet's Walkie Talkie, but targeted at more personal interactions with friends and family. The suggested use case is to have the phone mounted to the right of the steering wheel and in reach and within the line of sight of the driver.

But it is just concept work - so there is no need to be alarmed - even if it is in China where almost anything goes on the increasingly crowded highways. The latest project from GM in China - which has been mistaken by some as an already introduced product - combines social networking with the driving experience prospectively allowing drivers of OnStar-equipped cars to communicate directly with one another. This communication is to be enabled by an application combined with a license-plate scanning and recognition function.

Autoblog reported on the application here:

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/06/13/gm-app-scan-license-plate-text-driver/?a_dgi=aolshare_facebook

All indications are that the primary objective of the application is to enable social interactions beyond the car - ie. dating. We are not far from the day when cars will be communicating directly with one another, regardless of whether they are from the same car company or using the same service.

These services and experiments in China suggest that what car companies might envision for inter-car communications is not entirely what consumers will want to communicate from car to car. It does highlight, though, the power of inter-vehicle communication of traffic, weather, road conditions, local law enforcement or just an opinion on the latest World Cup result.

Of course, these kinds of communications have a direct analog to CB communications between truckers. And CB communications, too, are rarely confined to business.

Perhaps it is the novelty of the driving experience that is spurring this innovation in China. We might turn our jaundiced Western eyes toward China to learn what it is to be excited about driving again. It seems that most press reports from outside China about driving these days are about not driving at all - either fewer people owning cars or leaving the driving to a robot. If we could dial up that driver up ahead, in the next lane, or coming directly toward us...what would we say? Or will we let the car do the talking?