This week the ever so popular car manufacturer Hyundai is showing off a brand new type of NFC capability. Something surely we’ve all thought about before. Wouldn’t it be nice to unlock and start our cars all with our smartphone? Leave those bulky keys and keyless entry add-ons at home. This new smart car uses NFC tags to do just that.

It’s being called the Hyundai “Connectivity Concept” Car and is being shown off and previewed at the manufacturer’s European headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. This new concept is being shown on the manufacturer’s New Generation i30 car, using Near Field Communication (NFC) to complete the connection.

It’s simple. You use your NFC capable smartphone and pair it with the NFC tag nicely integrated into the vehicle and a quick tap unlocks the car. Then they’ve got a nice mat inside where you’ll also place the phone which acts as a stream to their 7-inch display. There you’ll get music, video, radio, phone contacts and much more. Obviously they won’t be encouraging Angry Birds on the display, but I’m sure we can hack that feature into it too.

That isn’t all either. Once placed inside the car that same mat doubles as a wireless charging dock. No wires needed. Simply place your wireless charging capable Nexus 4, DROID DNA, HTC Butterfly and some of those Nokia Lumia phones on the mat and you’ll be charged in no time. They’ll be using MirrorLink technology for Google Maps GPS, and tons of other things are possible with this technology. Obviously this is just a start, but I have a feeling we’ll be seeing much more at CES this year with cars integrating our smartphones.

[via SlashGear]

12 COMMENTS

  1. People do lose their phones quite frequently so there has to be a backup NFC device.

    And if you don’t have the phone and use the backup device to get in the rest of the screens will have to default to some barebones dashboard. Lots of design remains to be done…

  2. NFC doesn’t bother me, but I would not trust this. Imagine you’re out for a night on the town and your phone breaks (smart phones are fragile). Now you can’t pay for your meal, call for help, or drive home.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.