The EU May Yet Seize the Connected Car Crown in Spite of eCall

I despise the eCall mandate promulgated by the European Union. I hate this decade-old legislative effort primarily because it requires the use of old technology both in new cars and retrofitted into public service access points – the fire departments and local police departments that receive the emergency calls after an airbag deploying car crash.

I believe the eCall mandate set European connected car plans back by a decade as the U.S. crept forward led by GM’s OnStar service and, more recently, by China’s breakneck embrace of embedded connections in cars. But the EU may yet get the last laugh with the latest step toward a firm date for implementation.

To date, the European Union has represented the worst case scenario of government intervention in the automotive market, with the possible exception of Brazil. In the interest of saving a few thousand lives each year the EU has been working on an eCall mandate for about a decade.

I daresay that during that decade many more lives have been lost to wheel spinning testing and standard-setting activities that have dragged out and delayed – FROZEN – connected car development plans throughout Europe. And all of this in the interest of implementing outdated data-over-voice technology in a world increasingly characterized by transmitting voice over data connections.

The eCall mandate for the EU essentially requires all car makers to implement an OnStar-like solution, but without the call center. The latest news from Europe indicates that the European Commission has passed legislation requiring public service access points (PSAPs) in all member states be ready to receive eCalls no later than Oct. 1, 2017. In addition, the “go live date” for the eCall service becomes March 31, 2018 for all type-approved cars to be equipped with eCall.

The EU has even gone so far as to allocate €55M, or about 50% of the total projected cost, in support of the PSAP upgrades for receiving eCalls. A final vote is still required in the new year and wireless carriers have yet to fulfill their obligations under the law to implement the eCall “flag.”

In addition, car makers have already indicated their intention to delay vehicle upgrades to avoid the March 31, 2018 cutoff. (The requirement of the law is that eCall must be added to all new type approved cars meaning that as each car model is updated or as new car models are introduced they must have eCall.)

There is also the slight possibility that more car makers will implement their own private eCall solutions fulfilling the mandate without adopting the mandated hardware and software. The net result is more delays, more confusion and more lost lives, rather than fewer, as a result of the entire convoluted process.

The eCall mandate seriously impaired the EU’s ability to keep pace with car connectivity developments elsewhere in the world such as the U.S. and China. A true connected car stimulus might yet come from the EU in the form of reductions in allowable roaming charges – one of the biggest impediments to broad embedded telematics adoption.

But the one single positive outcome is that the EU has set the bar for emergency crash notification as an automated call for help from a vehicle that has suffered a crash severe enough to cause deployment of airbags. Elsewhere in the world, most notably in the U.S., more and more car makers are straying from this path.

In spite of OnStar showing the way with AUTOMATIC crash notification (ACN) in addition to driver actuated emergency calls via the blue button, a growing roster of car companies are offering non-automatic solutions. So far, Audi and Tesla do not offer ACN with their connectivity solutions and Chrysler requires the driver or a passenger to press the help button for a direct phone call to a PSAP – an approach Toyota is thought to be considering for the U.S. as well.

OnStar may be struggling for relevance in a post-smartphone world, but the one revolutionary feature that OnStar introduced was the automatic call for help. It will be a shame if the industry turns away from this core life-saving design criteria.

And if car makers continue down this path of non-AUTOMATIC crash notification – the U.S. may once again fall behind in the race for vehicle connectivity. But even if that were to happen, OnStar will remain the beacon of ACN worldwide – fitting given that the OnStar program that gave birth to OnStar was called Project Beacon.

There is one more piece of the puzzle some car makers are seeking to avoid: the call center – or as some prefer to refer to it: live assistance. We have crossed a threshold to a world where text messages, data and video feeds and other forms of communication from connected cars require more advanced systems for managing crash scenes remotely. This is no time to abandon the call center, as many companies have done.

I have been a major critic of OnStar for not moving forward quickly enough, but competitors would be unwise to unwind and dumb down the innovations that OnStar pioneered.