Audi will turn a car into a literal movie theater at CES 2019
It's not like you'll have anything better to do when cars start driving themselves.
When it comes to future in-car entertainment setups, automakers will soon have to keep upcoming developments like autonomy in mind. Audi will give us a glimpse of that future at CES 2019.
Audi announced this week that it will debut two different in-car technologies at CES 2019 in Las Vegas this coming January. One will be of use to occupants when the vehicle is moving, and the other will rely on the vehicle being entirely sstationary.
The first is something Audi calls an "on-the-road entertainment format." This one is pretty mysterious -- all that Audi offered up is a line about how automation will mean drivers and occupants will have more time to relax in a car, and that this new system will tie into that somehow. We'll probably have to wait until CES to figure out what this one actually is.
The other technology is even more intriguing. Audi will show off something called "Audi Immersive In-Car Entertainment," which requires that the car be completely stationary. By the sounds of it, Audi intends to turn its car into a fully-fledged content-viewing experience, which basically sounds like a drive-in movie theater where the car carries all the hardware for it.
There's a chance that this is the purpose of the "Audi Meets Disney" partnership that we wrote about in late November. The fruit of this partnership will also debut at CES, and in our exclusive report, Audi told us that it refers to a "new type of media," which I think in-car movie viewing would cover. And who better to lend their cinematic expertise to Audi than Disney? Whether this will also tie into Audi's long-established ties with Disney subsidiary Marvel Studios is yet to be seen, but we have less than a month until we find out for sure.