In recent years, the role of technology inside the vehicle has grown exponentially, impacting almost every feature domain within the cabin over this short time frame. With the global automotive industry racing even further towards the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV), the significance of these technologies to the overall in-vehicle user experience will only continue to grow.
Their success, however, relies on their ability to ensure that this experience is delivered in a seamless and satisfactory manner. As such, a deep understanding of the various roles and responsibilities of technology in the vehicle today, and the ways in which they extend or enrich that experience, is vital for any OEM looking to fulfil the promise of the SDV and guarantee customer loyalty for years to come.
Following our recent article on the HMI UX Benchmarking & Evaluation report series, this Insight will take a closer look at its sister report, the UX Enabling Tech Series. This new series performs a further UX deep dive into a curated selection of connected features and technologies offered with the models reviewed in our HMI UX Evaluation reports. While highlighting some key takeaways from its latest edition, which focuses on smartphone companion apps, we will also spotlight what’s next for the UX Enabling Tech Series and how you can secure your subscription to its future editions.
Key Takeaway 1: The status quo, and future potential, of vehicle companion apps
In line with broader industry trends taking root today, our experts see potential in the future of vehicle companion apps. Here, they highlighted that the next few years would represent an inflection point for them based on three key areas: feature sets, user experience, and communication. Today, however, both our experts and the consumers using these apps feel that they are not living up to expectations, with many lacking essential hygiene features, offering an inconsistent user experience, or exhibiting significant communication issues.
The changes needed to improve this status quo, and unlock the full potential of these apps, could be facilitated by a new, rapidly developing, industry trend: the car as a ‘third space’. Here, a growing number of automakers are envisioning the car as a living space between home and work, where the driving time freed up by automated driving technologies would allow occupants to connect, relax, and engage more directly with the vehicle’s connected features and services. With this future blurring the boundaries between life at home and in the vehicle, our experts see companion apps playing a pivotal role as a ‘bridge’ between these spaces and others set to play key roles in the user’s daily life (such as smart cities and lifestyle services).
Fulfilling the promise of this future, however, will require OEMs to streamline their companion apps while prioritizing differentiation, allowing these automakers to secure competitiveness as the companion app landscape continues to evolve. Here, our experts concluded that while companion apps will continue to be positioned as a value-add to the vehicle purchase, they will increasingly become an important consideration for OEMs as vehicles become more intertwined with the world of consumer electronics and wider ecosystems, including smart cities.
Key Takeaway 2: PaK as a pain point
A particular pain point of today’s companion apps highlighted by our UX team was the implementation of the Phone as a Key (PaK) function, using the PaK offered in Polestar’s app as an example. The team noted that this implementation, like many others, relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which they found to be unreliable and unsupportive over the testing period. Over this time, its reliability varied between both the type of smartphone used, and the model of vehicle being controlled through the PaK. The implementation of this PaK was let down further by the function not working on occasions, like when the Polestar app was not opened.
In adopting BLE, our experts similarly observed that Polestar’s PaK could not be used if Bluetooth was disabled on the user’s smartphone, with no prompts or tips offered to make the user aware of this. While demonstrating this pain point through Polestar’s implementation of PaK, our experts found that these issues were not only being experienced by Polestar owners, but by Tesla and Ford owners as well.
Building on their experiences with PaK, our experts drew up three key recommendations to automakers looking to implement their own solution as part of their current or future vehicle line-ups. The first was to ensure that any new PaK implementation matches the reliability of a conventional key fob to foster and instill trust among a broad range of users. Secondly, when implemented, the PaK must provide a high level of end-to-end security that ensures protection against all automotive cybersecurity threats. In their final recommendation, our experts stressed that the implementation should still be able to operate if the mobile device’s battery runs out. Here, they recommended the integration of a backup device, such as a smartwatch or smart ring, that would allow the user to unlock the vehicle when their smartphone cannot provide this functionality.
Conclusion
Despite implementation issues continuing to negatively impact the user experience of new companion apps, our experts predict that a focus on improvement will contribute to these apps gaining rapid momentum in the coming years. The team highlighted that the foundations of this change can already be observed in the growing convergence between the automotive and consumer electronics industries that, itself, will accelerate the transition towards the SDV. This trend is one of many that inspired our UX Enabling Tech Series, which has so far covered companion apps and hands-off driving systems.
For 2025, we will be extending the scope of the series even further with a new pair of reports focused on crucial elements of the EV user experience: Navigation for EVs and Public Charging for EVs. Together, these reports will explore the state-of-the-art for EV navigation and public charging through deep case studies backed by objective testing data compiled by our UX team. At the same time, they each pinpoint the best practices and novel ways of delivering seamless user experiences across different use cases for their respective technologies. Our experts then conclude these reports with a series of timely recommendations focused on enhancing the overall customer experience of your own EV navigation and public charging solutions in a way that ensures seamlessness and secures customer satisfaction.
Want to learn more about the latest technologies supporting contemporary in-vehicle user experiences? Then be sure to secure your subscription to our UX Enabling Tech Series!
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