Our cars will become increasingly connected over the coming years and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s going to take some of the pain out of car ownership and maintenance while making it much easier to live with our cars. Nissan has revealed that some of its new cars will have an option that enables the car to use big data technology in order to notify owners when maintenance is due.
Nissan has said that it’s going to start rolling out this feature with 2017 models in Japan and in India. The feature will then be expanded to other countries across the globe by 2020.
It’s an effort on the company’s part to stay competitive in the tough industry that’s making major strides towards the future. Car manufacturers are working on autonomous cars and increasingly their reliance on technology to improve the customer experience.
Car manufacturers also have to come up with new ways to keep owners loyal as car-sharing services and ride-hailing services threaten to reduce the number of car owners as people start relying on these services more and more for their transportation needs.
Nissan won’t just enable this feature on new cars. It’s also going to sell the device that enables this functionality so that owners can retrofit it and gain the same functionality in older models as well. It expects 30 percent of existing vehicles to eventually be equipped with this hardware.
A telematics control unit will power this feature as it enables Nissan and its dealer network to get information about the car’s location and diagnostics. That data is then processed to provide owners with timely maintenance notifications.