Taking a note out of the James Bond playbook, British car manufacturer Range Rover U.K. has developed a new prototype system allowing its rugged Range Rover Sport vehicles to be controlled remotely by way of a smartphone app.
Sound good? Check out a video below.
Although the technology is still just a prototype, if rolled out in a future product it would allow customers to not only unlock the doors of their Range Rovers, but also pilot them at slow speeds using the app — perhaps to help them park in tight spaces, or handle otherwise challenging conditions.
This isn’t the first car controllable by way of a mobile app. OnStar and Viper both allow users to unlock their car doors and start the engine with apps, while Apple has patented similar technology for a possible future iPhone iteration.
But Range Rover’s technology goes much further than many of these examples — and would offer a neat bridge between today’s existing vehicles and tomorrow’s self-driving cars in the process. The company has also said that it is looking into Siri or Google Now-style voice commands into a future version of the technology.
Given the obvious security concerns, we’ll have to wait to see if this ever makes it into a production model Range Rover, but it’s still pretty cool to see what’s possible!
Source: TechCrunch
