What Is Car Infotainment?

If you are a driver who listens to your favorite music genre on Internet radio on a head unit that also includes HD and Satellite Radio as well as AM/FM while you’re guided through traffic by a navigation system and your kids in the back seat watch a movie on the entertainment video system, then you are familiar with the new concept of infotainment.

 

Technology for the car has made such amazing leaps during the last 20 years, we are now getting products from both the aftermarket and OEM that provide entertainment as they also offer information. In short, there has been a combination of entertainment and information which has resulted in infotainment.

 

It used to be just an AM radio and then technology allowed us to listen to our tunes on FM radio. Then the radio was refined to allow you to play cassette tapes on them and then later play CDs. Then you could plug in your MP3 player into the head unit and now you were listening to music you downloaded from the Internet. Then came HD Radio that broadcasts multiple signals on one frequency so a radio station can provide a number of entertainment options and pass on information like the name of artists and the album the song appears on. Then came tagging so that you could save the information about the artist and song and then order the CD or download your favorite song based on the tag from iTunes or some other Internet site. Then most recently came Internet radio which allows the head unit to actually log on to a site on the Internet and get radio stations from all over the world that broadcast over the Internet. This is the entertainment part of infotainment. 

 

The development of the GPS navigation system was the beginning of the information portion of the equation. The first GPS systems guided drivers to their desired destination just by entering the address of that destination into the system. Those systems also included a database of millions of points of interest from historic sites to gas stations, restaurants, retail stores and more. Soon these systems were getting updated information about the condition of traffic in real time and could then offer you an alternative route so that you could avoid the jam. Then came information downloaded directly to these systems from the Internet. 

 

Once the ability to reach out to the Internet was accomplished, then ways to make that connection more secure came to be and that has led to Wi-Fi for the car. With the Internet connection you can now receive and send out email and log on to the website of a historic location you are visiting so that you can garner more information about the place without asking for help from an on-ground tour guide or even leaving your car. 

 

Then automakers realized that they could use technology already available to help to avoid crashes and that can monitor the driver to sense if he or she is drowsing off or losing concentration and then provide a warning to get the driver to focus again. 

 

And now automakers are experimenting with systems that will allow a car to become part of a network of cars so that your car can react to traffic situations and avoid possible collisions because cars farther up the street are passing information through the network to your car. And there are even experiments taking place right now with self-driving cars. 

 

That’s infotainment!