Smart Home, Smart Car – What we’d love to do with Tesla!

Smart Home, Smart Car – What we’d love to do with Tesla!

Your Smart Home’s Managing Director, William Hopkins, shares five minutes on some possibilities with the smart car…

 

We’ve been very interested in the smart car market for several years now.  At Your Smart Home, we’re big fans of Elon Musk (as you’d expect from a technology company).  We love innovation especially when there’s substance behind it; be that protecting the environment, enhancing safety, or simply making life easier.  Our own ethos is one of “comfort and control, without the complication” and Tesla very much embodies this.

 

For sometime though, we’ve been patiently waiting to see how the smart car will integrate with the smart home.  There were some inroads at CES in 2015 & 2016 but the general focus has been more about the autonomous vehicle, rather than the proper integration with the smart home (save for a few exceptions, including Control4’s concept).  We’ve had several ideas of our own, so in Elon’s spirit of collaboration and freely released patents, here’s a few points that we’ve thought of:

 

Environment

  • Geolocation
    • As the car approaches the home the heating system can kick in and pre-warm the house
    • As the car pulls up on the driveway, the house recalls the “Welcome” scene turning on lights, unlocking doors and activating the heating schedule
  • Plan journeys in your home and send the routes to your car
  • View where your family are – have ETA’s displayed or announced via the home automation platform or request updates using Amazon Alexa or similar

 

AV

  • Seemless syncing
    • Start listening to music in the house and continue where you left off in the car
    • Start watching a film in the house and continue watching in the car
    • One shared media library – everything you have in your home entertainment system can be accessed from the car

Security

  • Push notification sent to the home automation system if a vehicle moves off the driveway
    • Time periods could be set to detect theft (i.e. when the vehicle would not normally be moved)
  • The home automation system can track which cars are on the driveway and automatically set the security alarm if no presence in the house and no cars on the driveway
  • On leaving the house, if there is nobody present inside the automation system can put the house into “Away” mode, close and lock doors, and set the alarm system.
  • Secure Pre-warming/Pre-start of the car all from the home automation platform… the car can unlock and start up/heat up, but cannot leave until the user authorises it from inside the house

Utility

  • Charge levels of the car reported back to the home automation system
  • Remote starting from the home automation system
  • Service information passed to the home automation system
  • Calendar synced to car

 

This is obviously a non-exhaustive list of a few examples of things that could be possible.  To some extent, some of these things already exist, though the level of integration/implementation of them varies.  To quote directly from some other articles that I’ve read on the topic “it’s complicated”.  However, this is a viewpoint that I’d have to disagree with.

 

Creating this seemless link simply relies up on a basic principle on which the home automation market was original founded – integration.  Integration enables different devices to “talk” to other devices that may not naturally speak the same language.  Integrating a car is no different to integrating a Blu-Ray player – information is passed both ways to provide the user with end (graphical/physical result) that they were after.

 

In short, we’re not that far away from achieving this now.  Companies like Core Programming Limited, specialise in creating such integrations with home control systems (a task they do on a daily basis).  It usually involves a great deal or work, as protocols (the language used) may be undocumented.  However, in the case of the connected car, with a willing car manufacturer, this could be easily achieved.

 

Just a little food for thought – feel free to share any ideas/features that you’d like to see in the connected car… oh and Elon, if you read this – we’d be happy to help along the way!