Long Road to Go for Smart Home Car Integration

Like many sectors in tech, smart home has experienced its fair share of predictions that either didn’t materialize or have taken longer to arrive than expected. One example is the quest for a universal connectivity protocol for smart homes to tie together all the fragmented ecosystems that have arisen, with Matter being the latest entrant on which the industry is pinning its hopes.

A related prediction is the interplay between smart homes and connected cars, which various smart home companies have been mentioning as a possibility for the past few years. One recent deal was SmartThings’ integration with the SmartCar app, allowing users to check a vehicle’s location or mileage as well as turn on and off smart home devices as the car leaves or comes back. However, this initiative has failed to gain much traction.

As with smart home interoperability, the factor driving progress forward is adoption of voice assistants, primarily Amazon’s Alexa. For example, Ford became the latest automaker to integrate enhanced car control capabilities through Alexa in April 2022, which include controlling smart home devices in addition to the usual array of voice commands. Amazon has the greatest penetration among automakers, though Google Assistant is becoming more popular as Android Automotive is incorporated into more car infotainment systems. Guidehouse Insights expects that both assistants will coexist rather than one ecosystem dominating completely.

So What’s the Holdup?

Voice assistant compatibility is becoming expected among auto buyers, who overwhelmingly want to be able to access the same voice assistant in their car as in their home. Yet consumers don’t seem to be rushing to integrate their cars into their smart home automations, or scenes, even though the idea of the smart home system automatically locking doors and windows and shutting off the heating or cooling as you leave the house should be appealing. It’s also likely that most Echo owners aren’t creating any automations more complicated than setting timers, but for Amazon, the important thing is to make these capabilities available.

Part of the problem is that most smart home devices aren’t that smart yet. Most still rely on commands, whether through voice assistants or smartphones, just to turn on or off. Creating a more sophisticated scene to trigger multiple device actions based on a single command requires a lot of preparation, for which consumers may not have the patience or expertise. Paradoxically, the devices that are smart enough to interact without human input do so by generating amounts of data that many consumers find invasive.

Smart Security Points the Way

There is some progress, however, and it is being driven by smart home security companies. Vivint Smart Home introduced Vivint Car Guard in 2019, a device that plugs into a vehicle’s OBD-II port and integrates with the Vivint app. It allows users to check the status and location of their car remotely and to activate lights or cameras if the car detects tampering while it is parked at home. It also allows users to set a geofence around their home to activate smart home features when the car approaches. Its main benefit is for connecting older cars that don’t have embedded connectivity.

Although Car Guard is promising from the perspective of emphasizing smart home and car integration, it remains limited to Vivint’s customer base, and costs an additional $9.99 per month. For other smart home consumers, particularly the ones creating their own setups, integrating their car with their home remains a complicated process, in which they have to determine that their car’s voice assistant is compatible with what they already own.