Auto Industry Works Toward Electric Vehicles. These themes continued at CES, where many companies talked up their plans to make the world cleaner and safer. Automakers and their partner companies used the show as a platform for futuristic visions of electric, solar, connected and shared mobility.

Connectivity has become a major focus in the automotive industry. The ability to integrate vehicles with the internet-of-things (IoT) universe brings opportunities for enhanced services and personalization, but marketing executives like VMLY&R’s Aleks Niestroj think that there’s still progress to be made before cars go from “connected” to “smart.”

Another electric vehicle, BMW’s Vision iNext concept car, has a living-room-like interior with touch-sensitive fabric and a minimalistic control panel. In the non-car category, Bell showed off a prototype of the Nexus, a hybrid-electric propulsion aircraft that can take off like a helicopter and fly using six propeller-like fans.

Tesla founder and all-around tech visionary Elon Musk made waves earlier this month when he tweeted that he was considering taking the electric car company private. The tweet, which generated wild trading in Tesla stock and reportedly sparked a federal investigation, illustrates the perils of C-level executives acting on their own on social media.

In another example, US automaker Karma recently unveiled the SC1 Vision, a two-seat autonomous electric concept car that can biometrically authenticate the driver and passenger via voice recognition. And Porsche and software developer FogHorn have teamed up on a prototype anti-theft system that uses multifactor authentication with real-time facial recognition.

Location-based advertising gets an upgrade

Amazon is driving especially hard into the automotive industry, embedding Alexa directly into car dashboards to integrate with various connected-car systems. It hopes this will eventually eliminate the need for drivers to use multiple voice assistants and/or tethered smartphones and reduce distracted driving.