China’s tech titans take the battle onto the screen in your car

Photo credit: Alessio Lin / Unsplash.

China’s tech giants have already conquered everyone’s phones and they’re making good headway into our sitting rooms. So for their next move, they’re jumping into people’s cars.

Their target is the screen in the car, which the Chinese titans are now scrambling to fill with their own software – just as Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto are doing in the rest of the world.

Alibaba, which last year put its “connected car” system onto the screens of a Chinese-brand SUV, today got a big boost for its automotive ambitions after a joint announcement with Ford about collaboration plans.

“That marks the first time that AliOS, the operating system developed by Alibaba, is teaming up with an international automobile brand after the operation system was upgraded in September,” said Alibaba’s Simon Hu to Tech in Asia this afternoon. Hu is the president of the ecommerce firm’s Cloud and AliOS wings.

The news comes a day after Ford said it will launch 50 new models in China by 2025, of which 15 will be electric or hybrid.

Hit the road, Jack

While the partnership details are vague – Ford and Alibaba describe the union as “a letter of intent” – it shows Jack Ma’s company is racing to catch up with Baidu, which debuted its CarLife system in early 2015.

Baidu has already got onto the screens of numerous new models sold by Volkswagen, Audi, and Kia – to name but three – in China.

Here’s Baidu’s CarLife on a Mercedes-Benz GLA, shown off recently at CES Asia 2017:

Photo credit: Steven Millward / Tech in Asia.

Baidu has its own mapping service – as do Alibaba and Tencent – so it’s inevitably a central part of the system:

Photo credit: Steven Millward / Tech in Asia.

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