The smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car
as a sleek SUV-like model with seats that swivel so they face one another.
BMW and GM vehicles debuted with Alexa in 2018, and more car makers including Audi, Jeep and Land Rover have added the voice assistant since. With Alexa built in, drivers can remotely lock or unlock the car doors, turn on the engine or check the fuel from smart speakers in their home. Likewise, Alexa in the car can check the thermostat and turn on or off lights at home, while also providing information on weather or helping buy products on Amazon or at its Whole Foods subsidiary.
The e-commerce giant has also invested in Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer. In September 2019, Amazon then-CEO Jeff Bezos announced the company had ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian, at the time a relatively unknown company developing electric SUVs. “We’re talking about the largest marketplace in the world,” he said. Today “they are connecting the consumer with suppliers and the marketplace. In the future, when transportation is just a mode of moving from point A to point B,” Amazon will want its marketplace to be available for consumers there as well.While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so.
Ford assured reporters when it announced the Google deal that car owners will be able to install Siri or Alexa, but those Apple and Amazon products will have to work in an environment built by and optimized for Google. And only Google and Ford will have access to the user data generated by the system, which will be stored in Google Cloud.
“When smartphones took off, Google made sure they controlled search on Apple’s iPhone. They are doing the same thing on voice and connected cars. It’s a similar playbook,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III told reporters when the case was filed in December 2020. Though the states highlighted concerns about Google’s impact on emerging technologies, their lawsuit won’t go to trial until September 2023. Appeals are likely, meaning their case is unlikely to be resolved until 2025 or later. That lengthy timeline means a suit might not be able to stop Google or any of the tech companies from gaining a dominant foothold in the auto industry, monopoly experts warned.
Other major tech companies including Spotify, Tinder parent company Match and Epic Games have railed against the policies, urging policymakers in the U.S., Europe and Asia to break Apple and Google’s dominance. In August, South Korea became the first country to prohibit the duopoly from forcing companies to use their payment systems.
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