Want a phone that reliably connects to your car and mirrors on-dash what’s on your phone, even navigation apps? MirrorLink may be the solution. The MirrorLink protocol is off and rolling, slowly, as Sony today reveals its first MirrorLink-ready replacement car AV receivers. MirrorLink is the brainchild of the Car Connectivity Consortium. Once a phone is connected by a cable, the radio and steering wheel buttons can control the phone. Sound or music from the phone plays through the car speakers. If the car head unit has an LCD display, the phone’s display replicates on the head unit, even — especially — navigation. Just about the whole auto industry and cellphone industry belongs to CCC, with the exception of rugged-individualist Apple.
What Sony is doing represents a sliver of what CCC and MirrorLink hope to be, which is ubiquitous and meaningful in new cars. The replacement audio market is just about on on life-support. For those with older cars with an in-dash slot called DIN (7×2 inches) or double DIN (7×4 inches), life is good. The Sony XAV-601HD ($550) and XAV-701HD ($700) are double-DIN in-dash receivers with WVGA (800×480) 6.1- and 7-inch screens, USB jacks, and Bluetooth. Taka Noguchi, Sony’s mobile electronics business manager, cites data from industry analyst NPD calculating the market for double DIN replacement radios and head units at about 375,000 units a year (113,000 units with navigation, 262,000 without). This in a nation of 250 million vehicles.
The core attribute of MirrorLink is compatability between phone and car with MirrorLink as the common middle layer phone makers, automakers, and audio makers can write to. Currently, a customer satisfaction complaint involves hassles connecting phones to cars and being able to access all the phone’s features. That’s because each automaker (working with specalist subcontractors) has to repeat much of the same work the other automakers do. The MirrorLink features that owners will like are more visible: the ability to reliably control the phone using steering wheel buttons and radio controls, and the ability to mirror your phone’s screen on the car’s in-dash LCD display. Having an LCD display standard in the center stack calls for an attitude change from automakers whose current mindset is slowly evolving from, “If we can’t sell you navigation for $1,500, why should we put an LCD display in our car?” The answer is turning out to be that the customer will gravitate toward the small but increasing number of automakers who do have LCD displays standard. In other words: Move forward or die.
As for usefulness and safety: Navigation and music displays are replicated on the car LCD display — while videos and Angry Birds are not, at least not while the car is rolling. The MirrorLink spec calls for texts to be read aloud. Some owners will want to see texts on-screen as well, and some automakers, working outside MirrorLink, are providing that functionality in the belief that a little distraction (a text or the truncated start of an email message displayed onscreen) is safer than a lot of distraction (reading the text on your cellphone while moving). Without MirrorLink, says Mika Rytkonen, CCC chairman and president, motorists suffer an ”asynchronous, jarring and disorgani ed connected driving experience.”
Before you cast your fate with CCC, you should know the standard is still early in its life. For now, Sony acknowledges, the sum total of CCC compatible phones is the Nokia line and, once there’s a firmware revision, the Samsung Galaxy S3. That’s it. But the numbers can only grow. Every mainstream automaker, except Nissan, is part of CCC. The same holds for phone makers except Apple, and replacement car audio vendors led by Sony.
Chevrolet is about to launch a similar technology, GoGo Link, in the subcompact Chevrolet Spark and compact Chevrolet Sonic. GoGo Link also allows you to bring your smartphone into the car, connect it, and replicate the phone’s navigation and other apps on the integrated Chevy color LCD display. GoGo Link and MirrorLink make the most sense on entry-level cars since there’s about ero percent chance someone would add $1,500 factory navigation onto a $15,000 car. The other automaker solution is to embed navigation and price it realistically. Ford and GM are down to $795 for SD card navigation on some cars and Nissan charges just $595 for navigation on the 2013 Nissan Altima.
MirrorLink phone-to-dashboard screen mirroring gets rolling with 2 Sony car radios
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