Hyundai Digital Car Key App Announced
Hyundai Wants Car Keys To Become History.
Fed up of losing your car keys? Do you share a car with other family members? Do you just want one less thing to carry? Well, car keys could become a thing of the past after a manufacturer developed an app to control a vehicle by mobile phone.
Hyundai Digital Key App
Hyundai has created the ‘Digital Key.’ The new app uses Near Field Communication to enable your phone and car to talk to each other. Using this app you are able to unlock your car and more.
Once the smartphone unlocks the vehicle, you start the engine pressing the Start/Stop button after placing your phone on the wireless charging pad in the centre console.
The app can be used by up to four authorised people who each can save their preferred driving settings.
Once the phone and car mate-up, the position of the mirrors, seats and steering wheel will adjust automatically depending on the user’s requirements.
Additionally, through Bluetooth Low Energy communication, the Hyundai Digital Key can also lock and unlock the vehicle, activate the alarm and start the engine remotely.
Control Who, What and When
The level of access to different vehicle functions can be tailored to each user, for a defined period. I am assuming this could prevent your kids sneaking out in the car once you’ve called it a night.
Hyundai actually developed this technology with car-sharing schemes in mind. However, the press release says that “it could also be used to enable a courier to open the boot to deliver a parcel.”I’m not too keen but I can kinda see what they are getting at.
The Digital Key can be used to make peer-to-peer vehicle rental much easier. The Digital Key can be transferred via the smartphone app. That means no need for driver and owner to meet – similar to how Drive Now works, I guess.
The Digital Key will also have features such as an alert which can be triggered if the person renting the Hyundai exceeds the speed limit or drives outside an agreed area.
Ho Yoo, group leader of Hyundai Motor Group’s Electronics Development Group, told GadgetyNews:
The Digital Key will benefit a very wide range of future Hyundai customers, as well as enabling innovative new schemes for vehicle sharing. We are studying other ways to harness this type of connected-car technology to greatly enhance the driving and ownership experience.
Hyundai has said it aims to gradually implement the technology in its new production cars.
Fingerprint Unlock Your Car
It follows the manufacturer’s development of smart fingerprint technology that allows drivers to unlock doors and start the vehicle.
To unlock the car, the driver places a finger on the sensor located on the door handle. The encrypted fingerprint information will be identified and delivered to the fingerprint controller inside the vehicle.
The chance of incorrectly recognising another person’s fingerprint is one in 50,000. That ratio makes it five times more effective than conventional vehicle keys, including smart keys.
Would you trust this tech? Are we still keen on keys? Let us know below.
