The car as a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Starting Aug. 25, Chrysler will offer an option that will turn 2009 Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles into mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, a move we can soon expect to see copied by other carmakers.

Chrysler’s uConnect box, mounted in the trunk, will makes an EV-DO high speed cellular connection to the Internet and then convert it to Wi-Fi so that passengers in the car can have Web hookups for their laptops, handheld PDAs and game consoles.

Autonet says kids, who are bored with DVDs and would rather keep in constant text and chat contact with their instant-messaging friends, are a major source of demand for the system. Online video game playing can also be done with the hookup. Car-pooling commuters are also seen as a market.

Multiple users in the vehicle can connect at the same time and do their own online things and the Wi-Fi coverage cone extends to within about 50-100 feet of the vehicle.

Here’s a Chrysler=produced video showing it in operation:

I’ll be surprised if this is a big seller. For one thing, right now it’s way too expensive. And how many of us need to make multiple simultaneous online connections from our cars?

Besides, with 3G mobile phones, and USB EV-DO modems, all this connectivity is already possible.

But I think Chrysler’s jump into in-vehicle Wi-Fi hardware is an significant first step that gives us an idea of where all this is headed.

In five, maybe 10 years, this sort of connectivity will be factory standard. I see a day not that far off when cars will pull into a service station for fuel. At the pump, there will also be a button where movies, music and video games can be downloaded via Wi-Fi – for a fee of course, charged on the same credit card that buys gasoline – to the vehicle.

Further out, Wi-Fi access points will be mounted along the roadway, too, sending out official traffic alerts and weather statements.

When you pull into the garage at night, you can hit a button in the car to transfer your new media purchases to your home network. In the morning, the same button will sync up with what you downloaded to home computer.

And it will all be voice activated and controlled, too, so e-mails are read to you and voice recognition software can let you dictate your responses. There will even be video conferencing via the car, something I’ve already done (as a passenger) with a Verizon Broadband Anywhere USB modem and the free Skype instant message program and built-in camera on my Mac AirBook laptop.

This emphassis on the car as a communications vehicle is all part of the evolutionary march of in-vehicle personal technology. GM really started it in 1996 when it introduced OnStar. Ford jumped on the bandwagon last year with it’s Sync voice-activated mobile phone and digital music system. And now Chrysler’s Uconnect is about to go on sale.

There’s no stopping it.