Not without my assistance system

Electronic aids such as driver assistance systems or car connectivity have become indispensable in modern cars. This is not surprising. Features such as emergency braking, lane departure warning or night vision assist significantly improve road safety. And hardly anyone would want to do without the convenience of telematics, speech recognition or automatic parking systems. But how successful are the technical helpers really? The collision warning system, for example, is a real banger. In the vehicles registered in Germany between May 2013 and May 2014, just under 860,000 of these systems were fitted as standard equipment and a good 820,000 could be ordered as optional extras. For more than every third new car, however, the life saver was not available at all.

The picture was completely different between May 2018 and 2019. In a good 2.28 million of the registered passenger cars, the accident warning system was available as standard equipment. For a further 838,000 vehicles it was available as an option. It was only unavailable for around 556,000 of the models sold during this period. A clear vote for each assistance system. Similarly successful was the development of the automatic distance control, tire pressure monitoring system or overtaking assistant, even with headlights that steered with the vehicle or automatically dimming rearview mirrors.

Wifi on board

Telematics is the success story in vehicle connectivity. While only 170,000 new vehicles in Germany were fitted with telematics as standard equipment and 352,000 as an option between May 2013 and 2014, in the same period 2018/2019 around 1.48 million models had Internet access as standard equipment on board and a further 812,000 offered the possibility of ordering. The number of registered vehicles for which telematics were not available decreased by more than half (from 2.44 million to 1.12 million).

The number of vehicles equipped with a Wifi network exploded. From May 2013 to 2014, just over 8,000 of all registered vehicles had Wifi as standard. For about 710,000 cars, wireless Internet access could be ordered additionally. But for almost two and a half million cars, the technology was not available at all at that time. Today, things look very different. Almost 260,000 of the cars sold in 2018/2019 had Wifi as standard equipment, plus 1.67 million with the option of Wifi access. The wireless network was not available for 1.75 million cars. As a conclusion, a clear success in favour of car connectivity.

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