7 Automotive Tech Vendors to Watch in 2016

MADISON, Wis. — Move over, smartphones, UHDTVs and wearables. The spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas will be shining blindingly on cars.

Big brand-name car OEMs aren’t the only ones competing for attention. A bandwagon spilling over with wannabes from the high-tech sector will show off their software and hardware — deemed fundamental to the rejuvenation of the big-steel auto industry.

Poised to launch the revolution are electric vehicles, autonomous cars, computer vision, over-the-air upgrades, deep learning/artificial intelligence, human-machine interface, real-time 3D mapping, radar, lidar, more wireless connectivity and new automotive business models like “the car as a service.”

“The automotive industry used to be protected from the high-tech industry,” said Egil Juliussen, research director and principal analyst at IHS Automotive.  Not any more.  “You will be on the front seat at CES” staring down the highway to the future, he said.

“The automotive industry has been stable for so long,” Danny Shapiro, at Nvidia told us. The status quo was a set of large players deeply anchored in the traditional market. “That,” he said, “is about to go through a radical transformation.”

Of course, it’s still not easy for a tech company, especially among startups, to break into automotive. A long gestation period of testing and qualifying new technologies for the automotive market isn’t fundamentally compatible with the usual startup business model, said Jeff Bier, founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance.

Consider computer vision algorithms that must work under all conditions, Bier said. Apply the same algorithms to video gaming and “the technology working at 99 percent or even 95 percent of the time might be acceptable.” But, used for self-parking applications, “it has to work at 99.999999 percent of the time, if not 100 percent,” he stressed.

“For startups, that level of perfection is freaking hard,” said Bier.

Nevertheless, startups are gunning for the automotive market. In 2015, it seemed as though we were bumping into an automotive startup on a monthly basis, if not every week.

Part of the reason is the electrification of automobiles. As Tesla has proven, Google cars have demonstrated and Apple is about to show us, it’s now possible for non-traditional carmakers to crack the market.  Along with the electrification come application-rich, software-centric, electronics-packed cars. Many automotive tech startups now have a whole new roster of carmakers they can serve – beyond Detroit.

In the following pages, EE Times has put together a list of automotive tech companies to watch for at CES and/or 2016.