(13 Jun 2018) LEADIN:
With everything from facial-recognition locks to touchless controls, smart cars are taking centre stage at the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show Asia.
The fourth annual event opened in Shanghai with both traditional manufacturers and start-ups showing the latest in automotive technology.
STORYLINE:
Established brands like Honda and Cadillac join newcomers like Byton as part of the roughly 500 companies from across Asia unveiling new cars, robots, devices and software.
Byton, a startup vehicle manufacturer based in Nanjing, China recently raised $500 million from investors. It's debuting two new vehicles at the show, the M-Byte and the K-Byte.
They both feature large display screens, facial-recognition locks, cloud-stored user preferences and advanced exterior sensors.
"If you looked at the phone industry 12 years or 13 years, before everybody used Nokia phones. This phone has a very dedicated usage. It had some buttons and you can do phone calls with it and then Steve Jobs invented the smart phone," says Carsten Breitfeld, CEO of Byton.
"This not only changed the product, it changed the whole business model of the company and the same thing is happening with car companies right now," he says.
Both will first enter the Chinese market this year and then go to North America and Europe.
Japanese, Korean and other Chinese manufacturers are showing off their car models featuring hydrogen-cell batteries and driverless systems.
Some Chinese manufacturers are just part of larger firms that include software, global positioning satellite, and data processing corporations like China's largest search engine Baidu and its automobile arm called Apollo.
Apollo is featuring a driverless delivery vehicle and a driverless bus at the show as well as its navigation system which the company says can track in real-time hundreds of thousands of vehicles to warn passengers for mechanical faults and bad road conditions, to name a few.
Leap Motors, a subsidiary of the Chinese global video surveillance company Dahua Technology, boasts an advanced automated driving system because of its research and development of complex image-processing algorithms.
"Automatic parking relies on video and sensor technology. Integrating all these technologies, we can realise automatic parking in commercial level," says Zhao Gang, vice president of Leap Motors.
Asked about privacy concerns, Breitfeld says Byton anonymises and never shares with any governments the data it expects to accrue from its customers, while Zhao says companies must comply with government laws.
"Data can be used in a large quantity to analyse, but cannot be used to identify an individual. The identity information of an individual must not be exposed. We will follow the regulations strictly," says Zhao.
CES Asia opened Wednesday, June 13 (2018) and runs to Friday, June 15.
Expected to attend are 40,000 visitors which organisers estimate will generate 370 billion US dollars worth of production value.
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