Under Genesis’ agreement with Amazon, the owner of a G80, left, or G90 will be able to use an Alexa device such as the Echo, right, to, for example, start the car and set the temperature.
Alec Baldwin can now sit in his living room and yell at his car to unlock it and turn it on, and he has Hyundai’s fast-moving Blue Link telematics team to thank for it.
Blue Link is the underlying connectivity technology used by Hyundai and its Genesis luxury division. Earlier this week, Genesis became the first automaker to let Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices — made popular by Baldwin during a series of Super Bowl ads — remotely control various functions of the car.
Hyundai has set up its Blue Link team to work quickly and independently, almost like a startup company, making it quicker to market with buzzworthy features such as Alexa.
Hyundai’s platform isn’t revolutionary — it works as well as and similarly to others on the market. But being ahead of the pack with add-on capabilities has benefits.
Ratzlaff: “Agility to adapt”
“I wouldn’t say that the Blue Link platform is 100 percent the benchmark of the industry, but some of their development processes and culture has certainly shown a leadership status,” Mark Boyadjis, a senior analyst at IHS Markit.
For Hyundai Motors America’s Blue Link team in Fountain Valley, Calif., a degree of autonomy helps.
The team gets direction and permission from the home office in Korea. But it’s given the freedom and resources to act quickly on something it sees as useful for U.S. sales. (Amazon’s Alexa isn’t even available in Canada yet, much less Korea.)
“Globally coordinated localization” is how Barry Ratzlaff describes the setup. He’s Hyundai’s executive director for digital business planning and connected operations and oversees the development of Blue Link and its services.
“Our corporate structure and decision-making mechanisms allow us to both have discipline for the structured parts of the business and the innovation and agility to adapt,” said Ratzlaff.
The results have been impressive.
Hyundai has had a smartphone app for more than five years; it showed off a functional Google Glass application (though it never went to market because of the dwindling popularity of Glass); its smartwatch application was introduced in January 2015 with capability stretching back to 2012 models; and it was the first automaker to offer Android Auto connectivity and one of the first to pair that with Apple CarPlay.
The Alexa system enables Genesis owners to use voice commands on one of several wireless Amazon devices in their home to remotely control their car. Functions include locking or unlocking the car, turning it on, setting the temperature or honking the horn.
“It’s been interesting to watch how Hyundai has been relatively unique in leveraging collaborative partners on a micro scale, sometimes with just the U.S. in mind, compared to other OEMs who take a more bureaucratic approach,” Boyadjis said.
Mark Boyadjis
IHS Markit
During this decade, automakers have come to depend on connectivity features to carve out an identity. What’s under the hood means less to some drivers than what’s in the dashboard, because it’s the latter that people see, touch and talk to every day.
“After the recession, technology as a whole has been a huge growth engine for getting some of these automakers back to the sales numbers they were at, by far,” Boyadjis said.
Names such as GM’s OnStar — the industry pioneer dating back to 1996 on which Boyadjis said Hyundai modeled its system — Ford’s Sync, BMW’s ConnectedDrive and Fiat Chrysler’s Uconnect have become inextricably linked with their brands.
The quicker an automaker can come to market and grab attention with an innovative feature, the easier it is for that brand to set itself apart in an increasingly crowded landscape.
What’s next for Hyundai? Over-the-air software updates, a feature popularized by Tesla. “I’ll gently say it’s on the planning horizon,” Ratzlaff said.
Alec will be pleased.
