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“The dashboard is critical to our future, and that’s why we are here — to unite the automotive and broadcast sectors.” Jacqueline Bierhorst, WorldDAB president, could not have been more direct in her opening address at the WorldDAB Automotive 2024 conference on June 13.
The hybrid event brought together about 300 professionals, both in person and online, from the broadcast and automotive sectors to explore the latest developments in digital radio technology for the automotive industry. In-car listening has always been crucial to radio, but while radio still holds prominence in cars, will this continue? How will the rapid evolution of advanced dashboards and onboard entertainment systems impact this?
Radioplayer UK tested 10 new cars from the top 10 OEM brands, assessing the look and feel of the onboard radio experience, such as whether there was a radio button and how effective the car’s voice assistant was at playing a specific radio station. Six of the ten cars featured a radio button; two required just two clicks to manually play a pre-set station, while five cars required five clicks to achieve the same. Voice commands were no better — voice prompts correctly played the desired station in just five cars. “I think there’s a lot of work to do,” said Laurence Harrison, director of automotive partnerships at Radioplayer. “Particularly on voice, but this test gave us a good sense of where we are now.”
A joint roadmap
In the U.S. market, only 36% of the top 100 best-selling vehicles feature a radio button, according to the 2024 In-Vehicle Visuals Report by Quu. April Carty-Sipp, NAB’s executive vice president of industry affairs, and Fred Jacobs, founder of Jacobs Media, highlighted that Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are available in 98% of the surveyed vehicles.
On behalf of the EBU’s Connected Cars and Devices Group, Tomas Granryd, head of digital partnerships at Sveriges Radio, and Gwendolin Niehues, head of partner management audio and voice at ARD (the organization representing Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters), introduced the “EBU Connected Car Playbook,” a proposal for a joint roadmap to preserve and enhance the radio experience in connected cars. “We used to just say we want more — more prominence, more radio, more everything,” Niehues said. “What does ‘more’ mean? We need to define that. We always say customers love radio. We have to go back to why they love radio and how we can translate that into the new automotive space.”
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