Nabilah Safira
TechInAfrica – Toyota seems to notice how wifi has become almost an integral part of our current society, and its latest grip of this observation is quite practical to an extent- shoving a wifi hotspot feature for each car sold from September 1st of 2019 and onwards.
Let’s give a full look at the latest feature that the companies are churning us in and its integration into the cars.
It’s called Toyota Connect
The wifi feature resides under ‘Toyota Connect’, and this service is run within MyToyota App. The said connectivity hub will have full integration with the manufacturers and dealers’ systems. Toyota Connect is a major extension of the app, and this is what Andrew Kirby, Toyota South Africa’s President informed on us.
The service will provide the following functionalities:
- Wifi
- Live map
- Battery health indicator
- Trips iteration and digital logbook
- Driver behavior score
- GPS locator
Brief roundups of the overall features are; with battery indicator, driver will receive a follow-up of the battery’s condition, driver will occasionally given suggestion of the impending time to service the car, tracking the car whereabouts with the GPS locator, and automated saving of the car’s mileage and service history in the form of digital logbook with the purpose of calculating the supposed paid taxes.
The feature is telematics-heavy
If it’s telematics, what will it do for the drivers?
As quoted from rentalmatics.com, software that deployed telematics allows an exchange of communication between two or more electronic devices, or in a vehicle application, with human users, over a network.
For Toyota’s case, this means a real-time data of the car’s usage is possible to be exchanged between the car’s system to the fleet management’s. Consequently, if you agree to share your usage data, it will be sent to Toyota, the dealers’ network, fleet owners, and third-party service providers like AA who’s ready to assist you in regards to accident and breakdown matters, and the sent data will act as insights for all of the figures mentioned.
Altron, who’s also part of the partnership with Vodacom Business and Toyota, and its subsidiary, Netstar, who is in charge of the telematics and fleet management technology for the car, through its Group Chief Executive, Mteto Nyati sees the implementation of IoT (Internet of Things) on the cars drawing them as relevant players in the IoT sector. “The technology is locally developed, and we are truly excited for this collaboration,” he added.
15 GB is a given
When you buy the car, you will be granted a free 15 GB data, but once used up, you can manually do a top-up through MyToyota app.
Note that using airtime is doable, but it would cost outlier rates compared to the regular ones.
Convenient for 7-15 people
Say that you’re having an outdoor gathering or gaming, and bring a pack of buddies with the same need, which is, of course, the internet.
You can count on the wifi if you’re bringing about 7 to 15 people because that’s exactly the limit range of devices that could connect to the hotspot.
Exclusive to SA
The wifi will not work outside of South Africa, which sounds limited if the owners are going to drive their cars to other countries.
You can either opt-in or out off the service
Although the device can’t be stored off, the owner can choose to not engage with the service.
Expect more…
Kirby announced that more features will soon join the family, such as the ability for owners to renew their car’s license disc and delivered to the address they input. There will also be features that are specially designed to benefit fleet and small business owners, and car rental support.
“We will share details about these exciting developments in the near future,” Kirby added.
Source: Businesstech.co.za, Iol.co.za
