Car technology has grown in importance at CES in the nearly 10 years since Ford became the first automotive company to exhibit here. Much of the talk in the lead up to the show was about the pace of change towards self-driving or autonomous vehicles. Needless to say that this was an important topic for most of the manufacturers I visited, but it was far from the central focus. Here’s my summary of what I saw and chatted about with Ford, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Toyota, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and VW. Let’s start with the elephant in the exhibit hall: Autonomous vehicles The word on the street (see what I did there?) in the run up to the show was that there would be big announcements about self-driving technology. This didn’t really materialise, although Ford did suggest that they were hoping to get a ‘Level 4’ self-driving car on the roads for public consumption around 2020. ‘Level 4’, for those of you who are not doyennes of World of Jargon, means that the driver should not be re...
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