Your car is no longer just a car -- it's now expected to be a rolling computer and entertainment center as well. Automakers who get this right stand to gain huge ground in the battle for your money.
Individual automakers have touted their own versions of entertainment centers and other "connected car" products in the past, but the 2014 International CES showed a more comprehensive movement across multiple manufacturers, thanks to the involvement of tech leaders such as Google (GOOG +0.22%) and NVIDIA (NVDA +1.48%).
Motley Fool analysts Rex Moore and Austin Smith saw this firsthand at CES and have all the details in this video from the floor of the exhibit hall.
A full transcript follows the video.
Rex Moore: Cars are here! Nine out of 10 major auto manufacturers actually made it here to CES, at a consumer electronics show. Really, that's a change from years past, but now it's all about electronics in the car. Let's talk, first, about the connected car.
Austin Smith: Huge legitimization, seeing all these auto manufacturers here. What we're starting to see is, finally, the automobile industry has in many ways become kind of a computer on wheels.
There are serious players with a lot of technological firepower getting behind this, so this isn't some sort of Ford (F 1.30%) or General Motors (GM 1.42%) home-baked solution here. We're talking about companies like Google and NVIDIA getting very serious and making partnerships with Audi and GM and Ford, so you're starting to see the real tech companies backing this, not just some sort of home-brewed solution that was worked up by an auto company trying to figure out a connected-car solution.
No, they're getting real firepower behind it, and that's an indication to me that these products are going to be very well-executed, and they are going to go across manufacturers very, very quickly. You're going to start to see adoption at a level that you maybe haven't seen from previous infotainment centers that the auto companies have come up with on their own.
