NFC SmartPhone technology seams to show no bounds in where manufacturers and vendors can see applications.  At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Continental did just that, showing its NFC business mobile car keys.

This was previously demonstrated in Frankfurt, with their technology partner NXP (see video below)  and goes a lot further than simply opening the doors and allowing you to start the engine.  This business mobile allows you to recall preferences when the NFC SmartPhone is touched near the dashboard.  This customisation covers car seat and driving positions, climate and even media choices, the code can be set to particular drivers and logging, which could be particularly useful in fleet and car share schemes.

The Frankfurt show was on the back of an announcement that Deutsche Telekom was working with Continental to deliver ‘car keys’ to your business mobile, straight into your ‘mobile wallet’ securely over the air.

With this in mind perhaps Hertz, Avis and a fleet of other car hire companies could look to impliment this kind of solution into their fleet, giving them far more control over a car if a driver decides not to return it.

Interest in NFC from the car industry is currently swiftly gathering pace. This week, Morpho and Simlink unveiled an NFC key fob that connects to any WiFi-enabled phone to enable consumers to pay for items at the point of sale with their existing mobile device. In the same article, NFC World also reported on a white paper published by BMW, which has been working on NFC solutions for a number of years.

This article is copyright © 2013 Mike Bowers.