GENIVI Alliance Teams with W3C to Accelerate Adoption of Web Technologies in the Automotive Industry

The GENIVI Alliance, an automotive and consumer electronics industry association driving the development and adoption of an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) reference platform, will focus on accelerating the process of defining APIs for HTML5 web applications to interface to the hardware of the car, vehicle bus interfaces, etc.

W3C’s Automotive and Web Platform Business Group, (www.w3.org/community/autowebplatform) launched in February, convenes developers, automotive manufacturers and suppliers, browser vendors, operators and others to discuss how to enhance driving, safety and passenger entertainment with the Open Web Platform.

“The auto industry and W3C are exploring the ways in which the Open Web Platform can enhance the experience of drivers and passengers, while increasing safety,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “GENIVI’s participation plays an important role in ensuring representation of the diverse players within the auto industry. Given the Web’s overarching role in our lives, we see huge opportunity for society and the automotive industry to benefit from this partnership, and welcome GENIVI as a new W3C Member.”

“The HTML5 Auto API is imperative to enable the open source IVI community to rapidly and easily prototype, test and produce innovative user experience concepts,” said Matt Jones, senior technical specialist at Jaguar Land Rover. “The power of a full and complete abstracted application interface to enable the reading of all signal and sensor data from a vehicle should not be underestimated.”

HTML5 API for automotive promises to become a widely used set of technologies to build applications across platforms. In time, these applications could quickly be adapted from tablets to smart phones and now to cars. Eventually it will be the turning point as to when developers will start being able to create new concepts for the vehicle rapidly in a way that is standardized across multiple brands.

“As vehicles are becoming connected, it is important for automotive industry to benefit from world web standards adapted to cars, in order to simplify exchanges with the cloud and make final customer enjoy its digital life onboard,” said Philippe Gicquel, general manager for Cockpit, Safety, Infotainment EE Modules at PSA Peugeot Citroen.

During GENIVI’s recent All Member Meeting in Barcelona, W3C co-located its kickoff of this initiative. In addition to the four representative companies from GENIVI (BMW, PSA, Jaguar Land Rover, and Magneti Marelli), an impressive number of additional industry leaders will participate in the Group.

About GENIVI Alliance
The GENIVI Alliance is a non-profit industry association whose mission is to drive the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open source development platform. GENIVI will accomplish this by aligning requirements, delivering reference implementations, offering certification programs and fostering a vibrant open source IVI community. GENIVI’s work will result in shortened development cycles, quicker time-to-market, and reduced costs for companies developing IVI equipment and software. Comprised of more than 175 member companies, GENIVI is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. Please visit www.genivi.org for more information.