CES 2015: Jaguar Land Rover previews advanced in-car technology

Jaguar Land Rover may not have had a stand at this year’s CES, but the company was out in force with management, engineers and even designers present, plus a Jaguar F-Type on the Intel stand previewing a driver attention monitoring system. 

Auto Express was given an exclusive look at some of the tech being developed at JLR’s research and development centre in Portland, Oregon including smart new interfaces, secure links between smartphone and car, and experiencing a new 3D wrap-around simulator built in-house to test much of the new technology.

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We also got to see the latest version of the companies’ ‘ghost car’ technology, highlighting navigation instructions and even duplicating road signs that were obscured by trucks – all on a head-up display. That sort of technology will be transferred to the simulator to see how drivers react to it.

The driver attention monitoring system, co-developed with Intel and Seeing Machines, monitors driver eye movement, even through sunglasses. Although the technology is in the very early stages of development, it could be used to monitor the driver’s attentiveness and react by adjusting the car’s on-board safety systems.

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The F-Type being used at CES also featured a large, Tesla-style tablet display in place of the existing touchscreen and ventilation controls. We were shown a similar system in a Range Rover, with both cars being used for research to see how users react to such screens in JLR’s cars. 

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JLR’s director of Group Engineering, Wolfgang Ziebart, explained to us how the company was making its technology available to developers through open platform technology. “It’s a very unusual way of thinking in the automotive industry, but we’re leveraging the community to increase the functionality of our cars,” he said.

“It also helps speed up the process – key to our future is to add useful functionality faster than others.”

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Ziebart also revealed further planned collaborations with JLR’s InControl App system was being made available to other car companies, with mixed response: “We’ve encouraged others to join InControl apps, but many of our colleagues in other companies are more traditionally minded about this. However, we will have one large manufacturer join and several smaller ones.”

CES did coincide with JLR announcing four more apps available on its InControl platform, with more expected to follow soon.

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