Jaguar Land Rover unveils Smart Assistant and Virtual Windscreen concepts for future cars
Fresh tech initiatives show possible upcoming features for the iconic car brand
CarPlay and Android Auto may soon be battling it out to be the brains of your ride, but Jaguar Land Rover has some distinctive smart features of its own in the works for future vehicles.
The biggest of those is today’s announcement of a built-in Smart Assistant feature, which will incorporate an array of self-learning features that are enhanced each time you go for a drive. The car will sync with your mobile phone to recognize your proximity and automatically adjust the seats and mirrors to match your preferences.
Once in the car, the Smart Assistant can alter further preferences based on your schedule—again synced via the phone—and the weather. As the video below shows, if you usually drop your kid off at school on a weekday morning, you’ll be pointed in that direction, plus the vehicle will recognize a passenger and shift entertainment preferences as such.
You can also get alerts on your phone for when you need to leave for an appointment based on traffic, plus Jaguar’s service can automatically message colleagues or friends when you’re running late on the road. And if you routinely call the missus on your way home from work each day, the car will learn that and offer to ring her at the appropriate time.
Furthermore, an Auto Adaptive Cruise Control (AACC) feature will learn from your own driving techniques and mannerisms and apply them when engaged. All told, Jaguar says the system should minimise driver distraction “with an eventual goal of zero accidents.” A lofty objective, indeed.
And if you’d like your daily commute to feel more like a video game, Jaguar also has plans for a Virtual Windscreen, which can project info like speed, hazard alerts, navigational info, and even a racing line upon the glass—not to mention a “ghost car” image to help you beat your past best times.
That’ll have more benefit on the raceway than the average road, but there are more practical purposes as well. For example, keeping in step with the goal of reducing driver distraction, the system allows gesture controls for interacting with in-car features, thus allowing you to keep your eyes forward at all times. And Jaguar is looking at killing rear view and external mirrors by using cameras and 3D imaging to maintain a sense of depth within the video feed.
In short? Jaguar has interesting ideas afoot, and we’ll be excited to see some of these in action. However, both are pegged as concepts for now, so it could be years before your next Range Rover auto-directs you based on your calendar, or lets you race an A.I. version of yourself through the countryside.
[Source: Jaguar Land Rover Media Centre]
READ MORE: How do you make the Jaguar F-Type better? “You make it faster”
Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
