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Audi partners with AT&T for 4G LTE, will offer Mobile Share data plan

Audi has made a big splash at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, joining the Open Automotive Alliance with Google, Honda, Hyundai, General Motors and NVIDIA, debuting a next-generation cockpit that's destined for the third-generation Audi TT and promising to offer laser headlights in a production car. But much like Apple during the Steve Jobs days, it has "just one more thing."
The German luxury brand has announced that it will, like Chevrolet, be teaming with AT&T to offer 4G LTE connectivity in its vehicles. The first model to benefit will be the 2015 Audi A3.
"With the introduction of the new A3 family Audi is putting the most advanced technology into the compact luxury segment," said Scott Keogh, President, Audi of America in a press release. "Offering drivers a 4G LTE connection will provide the fastest in-vehicle connection available and significantly enhance the infotainment experience."

Audi wants to keep you healthy while behind the wheel

Health tracking is all the rage. You can get smart watches and smart wristbands and all sorts of silly tech to give you intricate metrics about your wellbeing. Hell, my bathroom scale is connected and will automagically sync my latest weight, body fat, and heart rate readings to an app on my smartphone. Bathroom scales and wearables aside, Audi is hoping to bring this fitness-tracking tech to four wheels with its new Fit Driver system. No surprise, the new program was announced at the technophile's paradise that is the Consumer Electronics Show. Paired with a wearable, like an Apple Watch or FitBit, that would monitor heart rate and skin temperature, the car's sensors can track a driver's breathing and driving style. This data can be analyzed alongside weather and traffic information, effectively allowing the car to determine how stressed or tired a driver is. Systems within the vehicle would then be tweaked to "relax, vitalize, or even protect the driver." This can take the form of an automatic massage and adjustments to the cabin temperature, ambient lighting, and infotainment. So when you're about to go full road rage because there's a Camry doing ten under in the left lane, Sirius could flip on the easy listening of Watercolors to calm you down. Naturally, this technology is still in the early stages, and there's no word about when it could actually arrive in production vehicles. But as driverless systems evolve, Audi is aiming to develop such an advanced health suite that an autonomous vehicle could detect a medical emergency, pull over safely, and call for assistance. Here's to the future, folks. Check out the official release below. Audi Fit Driver Audi envisions a future in which drivers leave their cars more relaxed than when they entered them. The car, as a personal yet simultaneously connected space, is ideal for health and fitness monitoring. Under the motto "my Audi cares for me", Audi Fit Driver will become a supportive driving companio. The Audi Fit Driver project focuses on the well-being and health of the driver. A wearable (fitness wristband or smartwatch) monitors important vital parameters such as heart rate and skin temperature. Vehicle sensors supplement this data with information on driving style, breathing rate and relevant environmental data such as weather or traffic conditions. The current state of the driver, such as elevated stress or fatigue, is deduced from the collected data.

2016 Technology of the Year Finalist: Audi Virtual Cockpit

The heart of most infotainment systems is a touchscreen in the center console. In many systems, some information can be sent to the gauge cluster in slightly redacted form – stripped-down navigation commands, basic audio info, that sort of thing. To get the full story, the driver has to take their eyes off the road and look to the middle of the dashboard. Audi's Virtual Cockpit, in essence, ditches the center screen and places all that information in the gauge cluster. The high-resolution TFT screen is just over a foot wide, and it has two main modes: Classic view, and Infotainment view. Classic looks like many other traditional TFT gauge clusters, with large traditional gauges and the ability to display a decent amount of information in the space in-between. Go into Infotainment view, and the gauges shrink and head to the lower corners, freeing up a much larger amount of real estate for, say, the nav system map. The gauges also get out of the way when utilizing the menu, entering a destination, or that sort of thing. The four main modes are standard stuff. Virtual Cockpit will show you navigation, media, phone, and trip computer information in large or small formats. You interact with Virtual Cockpit with a familiar MMI wheel-type controller in the center console, like in many other Audis, or with buttons and a scroll/push wheel on the left side of the steering wheel. Climate control functions are handed by physical controls cleverly integrated in the center three vents. It takes a lot of processing power to make all this work as well as it does, and that's handled by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processor – a quad-core processor usually seen in tablets and smartphones. The system is quick and responsive, and we found the high-resolution screen to be impressively sharp. If there's a downside, it's that Virtual Cockpit doesn't leave an opportunity for a passenger to step in and, say, enter a destination or change the radio station without altering what's right in front of the driver. It could be inconvenient at best, distracting at worst, to have the nav system directions you're trying to follow suddenly be superseded by the audio menu. Adding a small secondary screen for the passenger could be one fix; a connected companion smartphone app another. In the meantime, it's an impressive implementation of a clever idea.