Volvo planning to turn its cars into iPhone on wheels, says CEO Rowan

All the stuff that you can do in your smartphone will be almost inherently native within the vehicle, Rowan said

Automakers used to compete over who had the latest-and-greatest hardware on offer: the highest-horsepower engine, the comfiest seats, the silkiest-sounding speakers.

As manufacturers try to turn their vehicles into rolling smartphone-like devices, the race will revolve around the next big things in chips that upgrade infotainment and vision systems, as well as the car’s general controls.

“That is really the big change that’s happening in the industry,” Jim Rowan, a former top executive at BlackBerry and Dyson who started as CEO of Volvo Car last week, said Tuesday.

Rowan, 56, saw the upheaval up close, from the perspective of a major player on the wrong end of the disruption. During his time at BlackBerry, the company more than quintupled revenue to over $20 billion. But by the time Rowan left in 2012, BlackBerry’s once-dominant brand and operating system had been soundly beaten by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

“Ostensibly, the product stayed the same,” Rowan said. “You could make a phone call and you could share some data. But the transformation between a feature phone and smartphone, in a very short period of time, transformed the use of that device a thousand times.”

A phone was no longer just a phone. And the same is happening to the car.

“A vehicle is a vehicle, but what we’re going to do in the journey that we’re on is to make so much technology available in that vehicle that it massively expands the use of that next-generation mobility,” Rowan said. “All the stuff that you can do in your smartphone will be almost inherently native within the vehicle.”

We’re going to have to be a lot more intelligent about the decisions we make around making versus buying software, and we’re going to need to understand software at a much more vestral level than before, he said in an interview.