Toyota, Ford and Livio launch industry standard for connected cars
Toyota and Ford have come together, alongside connected car and home tech brand Livio (owned by Ford), to establish a common industry development and operation framework for in-car connectivity and telematics.
The framework will be around Livio's SmartDeviceLink but the businesses have encouraged other car brands and app developers to join the ‘open source’ initiative. Having better scale around a common system will encourage more innovation in the services offered within connected cars. The current ecosystem creates expensive development costs due to fragmentation.
Ford and Toyota first came together in 2011 to try and establish a level of standardisation and partnered with Livio last year to test its integration within their cars.
Alongside this announcement, timed with CES in Las Vegas this week, Toyota also said it would be commercialising a system using SmartDeviceLink.
Shigeki Terashi, executive vice-president of Toyota Motor Corporation, said: “Developing a safer and more secure in-car smartphone connectivity service which better matches individual vehicle features is exactly the value and advantage an automaker can offer customers. We expect that many companies share our view and will participate in the industry SDL collaboration.”