- At today’s Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung announced its efforts to get us phone car keys.
- The company has partnerships with Audi, Ford, BMW and Genesis to make this happen.
- Unfortunately, the various companies have to adopt a UWB standard for this to work the way Samsung envisions it.
Most people now use an FOB key to lock or unlock their cars. A smaller group might use apps to do the same thing, while an even smaller group might use NFC communication.
In the future, however, we should be able to simply walk to our door and it will open. That’s it.
This is the future Samsung has in mind anyway. At today’s Galaxy Unpacked event (which unveiled the Samsung Galaxy S21 range), the company announced strategic partnerships with auto companies to make phone car keys a reality. So far Audi, Ford, BMW and Genesis are on board.
Phone Car Keys: How Would That Work?
The linchpin for this magical world where your car knows you are at the door and will automatically unlock is ultra-broadband technology – or UWB. Because UWB is incredibly accurate at low latencies, not only can your car know that you are nearby, it can also know your exact physical location in relation to different parts of the car.
In other words, with your phone in your pocket, you could walk to the trunk of your car and the trunk would unlock. The rest of the car wouldn’t, however. Likewise if you went to the driver’s door or the passenger door.
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For all of this to work, automakers would have to build UWB into their vehicles and place them in strategic locations throughout the body. Thankfully, today’s news suggests four of the largest auto companies in the world are driving this forward.
If every manufacturer uses the same protocols, you could even theoretically share your car key with other people. It didn’t matter what phone they were using or what operating system they were using. However, it would matter whether the phone’s hardware supports UWB or not – which is still relatively rare. Samsung even admits that the vanilla Galaxy S21 doesn’t support this (but the S21 Plus and S21 Ultra do).
It will be a long time before we can use our phones as car keys, but the day got a lot closer with today’s announcement.