At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, Visa and Pizza Hut introduced something that’s entirely unique (and somewhat odd): a new connected car technology that lets you order a pizza from your car. The feature is called ‘Interactive Voice Control,’ and it will let you dial Pizza Hut hands free from your car to place your order. Once that’s done, you can use the Visa Checkout system to pay for your order with a few taps of your dashboard.
How Interactive Voice Control Will Work
The premise here is simple enough. By pushing a button on your dash, you can directly dial the nearest Pizza Hut outlet. Once you’ve placed the order, you can then pay using Visa Checkout with “just a few clicks” (as Pizza Hut reps put it). But, it gets even easier than that. Using Beacon Technology, the employees at the Pizza Hut you ordered from will be notified when you arrive to pick up your pizza. This way, all you have to do is walk in, pick it up, and be on your way–talk about a really fast and simple way to bring home dinner!
Future Possibilities
Right now, the new Visa technology is food focused, but this tech could easily be applied to other areas too. For example, the future car that you buy could be hooked up to the Visa network, and this could mean that you can pay for things like gas and your morning Starbucks latte from your car. Visa is going to test the technology across Northern California this spring for three months. After that, you can expect the tech to come to a car near you, or possible through separate car consoles.
Tech Keeps Getting Crazier
You may not see an immediate need to have a pizza ordering system inside of your new car, but that’s the way that tech is headed. Soon, you won’t have to leave your car to do much, and the emphasis is on simplifying basic everyday tasks. Car tech has also evolved to make driving safer, though, and that’s a good thing.
With the implementation of laws such as the car backup camera law that will go into effect this year (all new cars must have a rear view backup camera installed in 2015), and many other tech advancements (including some of the safety that will coincide with driverless cars), cars will be safer than ever before. So, while you can order pizza from your car and eventually pay for things from your car too, cars are also going to be much safer (and maybe easier) to drive.
Making Sure Your Car is Safe
It will be a while before every car on the road has technology like a rear view backup camera, but you can install one of these cameras on any older model as well. For information about backup camera installation, come into QuickVu and Trail Ridge Technologies today, or call us to find out more about car backup cameras. While we can’t help you order pizza from your car, we can help to make sure that any car you own is safer–this is especially important if you drive little kids around, or if you have a teen that will be driving soon.
Every day, we see more car tech news emerging, and things like the new Visa/Pizza Hut venture are really breaking any barriers that might have been in place before. Cars are far more than vehicles now, and you can expect to see a lot more advancements coming your way soon. We’d love to know what you think about this new Pizza Hut deal. Come and join in on the conversation on Facebook, and let us know what your thoughts are!