The humble car-key fob inches toward obsolescence with the announcement of Android 12’s officially supported Digital Car Key framework at Google I/O 2021.
A number of automobile manufacturers Polestar, Hyundai, Lincoln and others already offer the ability to lock and unlock the doors or start a car using your Android phone as a key. In fact, until Apple announced its own digital key tech last year, Android was the only way to ditch the fob.
Google says that digital car keys will become available later this year on “select” Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones, but we don’t know what models they have in mind yet. But no Pixel phones yet have used UWB technology maybe with this new car key feature, the Pixel 6 will be the first. Apple is using UWB in the iPhone 11 and 12 series of phones, enabling things like AirTags, improved handoff features between the iPhone and HomePod mini and the aforementioned CarKey feature, among other things.
Naturally, automakers will need to enable this feature and cars will need the technology to support it, so it’ll be a little while before it’s commonplace to unlock your car with your phone. As with Apple’s CarKey technology, BMW is the first partner Google has announced, but the company says it is working with other unnamed automakers as well.
Google also announced a feature that should be more immediately useful. The company’s Fast Pair technology that makes it quicker to connect to Bluetooth devices is coming to cars from BMW and Ford. Hopefully, this will make pairing your phone with a car as simple as it is to pair it with Google’s Pixel Buds headphones getting your phone hooked up to most cars is definitely a bigger hassle than it should be.
