I was reading a very interesting Reuters article about Honda’s new entry into the hybrid car market. It talks about how Honda has differentiated itself from Toyota (the previous market leader in this area) by incorporating an innovative software in its new hybrid model: Insight.

But pressure to innovate in the hybrid market won’t necessarily be all about the hardware. If hybrids and other cars embedded with electronic controls and more advanced computing power make their way into the mass market, opportunities could also arise for software. The Insight, for example, includes an “Eco-Assist” display on the dashboard that takes a cue from video games to help educate and encourage drivers to accelerate and decelerate for maximum fuel efficiency. As Wagner James Au explained in an Earth2Tech post about the feature earlier this year, “Like a role-playing game, the driver’s behavior is also tallied over time, and displayed symbolically — here, in the form of an ivy-ringed trophy achievement that a driver can gradually unlock with green-friendly driving. It’s sort of like Wii Fit, but for cars.” Depending on how much Honda decides to open that data, it could provide fodder for game developers, application platform providers and other industrious web entrepreneurs.

Software as a critical competitive advantage has already been a proven fact in the cell phone industry. Now it’s the auto industry’s turn. As software developers, we live in exciting times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 2:28 am and is filed under General, The state of the art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.