The Road to a Smarter Future: The Smart City, Connected Cars and Autonomous Mobility

The paper surveys and examines the technological development and nature of the car as a pivotal example of a contemporary smart product in the context of the vision of the smart city and its vision of more efficient urban transportation and safer road use through data-generating and receiving smart or ‘connected’ cars. The paper examines the role of cars that interact with digital city infrastructures (such as cloud-based systems) to enhance and predict hazardous road conditions, and how users employ car-based connectivity to mobilize the vehicle and connect with wider smart systems. Furthermore, the paper looks to the increasingly levels of autonomous technologies that enable drivers to give some control to the intelligent vehicle (such as Tesla’s Autopilot), and critically considers the future trajectory of the smart and connected car in terms of its status as a product that represents the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Finally, the paper critically discusses the connected car's potential to develop increasing autonomous functions that intensify its levels of smart city interactivity to enhance smart urban mobility.