5 reasons why Matter matters for EVs
What is Matter? 🤔
Spoiler alert: I’m not talking about “something that is made up of various types of particles, occupies physical space and has inertia”. The Matter we’re talking about here is a new standard for smart home devices such as the Echo Dot laying on your shelf, the Phillips Hue Bulb in the lamp by your bed or even (absurdly) your LG Smart Refrigerator in the kitchen that you can tweet from.
Created by Project Connected Home Over IP (aka Project Chip) in 2019 and now maintained by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance), Matter is a royalty-free smart home standard, built for encouraging interoperability between devices and platforms (like Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings).
Other than providing a common baseline for various devices and platforms, it also addresses a few other key issues with the existing smart home scenario — but I won’t delve into those details here.
If you wish to know more about matter, I’ve linked a few really comprehensive blogs on the same at the end of this story.
EVs, Matter🚗⚡
So Matter is cool and all when it comes to smart home appliances, but where do EVs come into the picture?
Well, you might be thinking that a lot of manufacturers already provide a wide range of functionalities that help you control various aspects of your vehicle from your smartphone — and yes, that is correct.
Things like
- Locking / unlocking the car
- Opening / closing the boot
- Opening / closing the windows
- Flashing the headlights
- Honking the horn
- Running the A/C to either pre-heat or pre-cool the cabin
- Connected car tech (vehicle stats, charging status, geo-fencing, etc.)
are already proudly presented on brochures and websites for various EVs. Certain manufacturers like Tesla take things one step further and allow you to “Summon” your vehicle to you from a parking lot (although this doesn’t necessarily work as well as advertised).
How can Matter integration improve upon this?
1. Automations
Smart home appliances already do a great job with automations. They can be programmed to perform certain actions based on various cues like the time of day, temperature etc. Now imagine if we can use such cues to also perform certain actions in our cars. For example, based on the time of day and the day of week (7:00am, Monday morning), when the thermostat detects that the outside temperature has fallen below say 17 degrees Celsius — your car automatically begins to pre-heat the cabin.
Here’s another scenario — Let’s say you’re on your way back home and the navigation in your car sees that you’ll reach in about 15 minutes, it can turn on the driveway lights based on when you’re supposed to arrive, turn on the air conditioning and things like that. All of this can also be set to trigger when you enter your driveway instead of relying on the navigation system.
A bunch of new EVs are coming equipped with ‘Vehicle to load’ technology, essentially turning them into giant battery banks or even back up generators when needed. Imagine if you’ve plugged in your EV overnight for charging and there is a blackout. Knowing how much charge the average commute to work and back takes, the surplus can be then transferred from the EV into the household to power essential appliances.
Let’s say you like to play songs on your smart speaker while you get ready for work in the morning. Once you have to head out, how amazing would it be if the same playlist and the same exact song that was last playing syncs with the music system in your car!
2. Wider reach
If we look at how ADAS has become more and more of a standard across vehicles, Matter compatibility could also theoretically become a standard for cars over a few years and thus would be more widely available to consumers in all ranges of EVs.
A larger adoption would mean overall improvements when it comes to stability, reliability, features and functionality. With more minds and manufacturers at work, this would allow for rapid innovations since everyone gets a chance to bring all their ideas to the table.
3. Outsourcing
When all manufacturers have to comply with a standard, that standard is usually then outsourced from dedicated manufacturers that solely work on that particular subject.
Think of tyres for example, when brands like MRF and Michelin came into picture, manufacturers simply started outsourcing tyres from them instead of having a separate division to make tyres — this saves them valuable time and resources that would otherwise go into R&D.
A similar story here could mean that specialized firms could crop up which solely focus on components that help integrate EVs with Matter. Modular kits could be developed which allow manufacturers to choose just how much they want their EVs to be able to do — not all cars need to be able to drive in and out of parking spaces for instance.
4. Matter & Self-Driving
Let’s say you’re using Tesla’s Autopilot system on a road with a sharp curve. The car sees that on the navigation system and also with its cameras. It slows down to what it thinks would be a comfortable speed to approach the bend, but it is still going a little too fast — you take over, hit the brakes to slow the car down further and steer it safely around the bend.
A Tesla is able to learn from such experiences and do a better job around the same bend the next time around. But not only that, it will relay this information about that particular bend to all other Teslas so that they don’t make the same mistake. This means that a Tesla is able to communicate with other Teslas — just not in real time.
Now imagine how handy real time communication would be between two Teslas which are cruising on a highway with autopilot enabled. Sounds great. But imagine, what if all cars — regardless of the make — are able to communicate in real time. This would give all manufacturers such a huge boost when it comes to autonomous driving since all the cars are aware of what their surrounding cars (within a certain range) are up to.
Any potential crashes down the highway will be communicated to all approaching cars, if a car needs to take the next exit on the highway, the cars nearby can slow down to allow for that maneuver — the possibilities are endless.
This could truly make cars safe since they would be equipped with chips that can make decisions before any human would even fathom what’s going on, on top of that they would learn from each other and improve!
Just as communication is key to avoid arguments or misunderstandings, communication between cars is key to making roads safer.
5. Commercial Vehicle Tracking
Commercial vehicle tracking should also see jumps in accuracy since you can literally audit off of other surrounding cars to keep track of your fleet of vans or trucks in real time. Combine this with a ‘smart-counter’ (a device that literally just increases counter value when a vehicle drives past it into the depot, or decreases counter value when a vehicle drives past it out of the depot) and now you have an automatically updating live status of how many vans/trucks are in/out of the facility.
When visiting charging outlets, you can have a second layer of logs which store data like which charging stations were visited & for how long, how much charge was added to the vehicle, etc. — this is useful when EV drivers file for reimbursements.
Final Thoughts 💭
All the scenarios I’ve mentioned above sound pretty convenient, but just how convenient is it to turn this into reality?
Well, to begin with, the reason I am writing about integrating Matter with EVs over traditional combustion engine vehicles is that most new vehicles are going to be EVs. Then there is the argument that it is simpler and safer to remotely control HVAC controls without having to first turn on the petrol/diesel engine and then controlling HVAC. The vehicle-to-load tech is possible only in EVs and when it comes to quick maneuvers to react to sudden changes while communicating with other vehicles on the road, the instant torque from an electric motor is simply unmatched.
The major chunk of Matter integration should revolve around software — which is also no easy task but it offers less friction than having to incorporate physical modules to vehicles. This is made easier thanks to the fact that most new EVs come with ADAS components to begin with, which software can then take advantage of.
Additional Resources🔗
Learn more about Matter and how it works —
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