A personalised lease car? A dream come true

Not long now: you will soon be choosing a new lease car. Many factors play a role in this choice. Which car fits within your mobility budget? Which brand and model do you prefer? And which car best suits your personal and professional needs? Fortunately, the current lease offer makes your choice a lot easier. You can easily adapt most cars – and their interior – to suit all your needs. In fact, more and more lease cars are fully customisable thanks to numerous new technologies. You can read about how this works in this blog.

Would you notice if someone used your car? Most likely right away. Your seat is in an unpleasant position, the mirrors are adjusted differently and the radio is no longer on your favourite station. Not to mention the air conditioning blowing annoyingly direct into your face. If you have experienced this before, you know that the smallest detail in your car has a major impact on your driving comfort. Adjusting everything again takes time and is guaranteed to cause annoyance.

So, what now? First of all, take a deep breath in and out and then turn everything back to its proper state. Our blog with tips to adapt your chair correctly to your body can certainly help you with this. And there’s good news for the future: this unpleasant situation will probably no longer be a problem with your next lease car: from automatically positioning your chair, to even a personal greeting. Modern car models can remember and collect a variety of information about their passengers. Thanks to digitisation, you can already experience this for yourself. Central onboard systems of new car models automatically adjust your car to pre-set settings. All you need to do is identify yourself when you get in.

Your personal user profile

But how does the identification work? The car recognises you by your saved user profile. This works best if the car is your property or your lease car. Once set, you can return to your personal profile once someone has used your vehicle. This will usually be controlled by means of voice recognition, a digital assistant or a physical chip in your car key, for example.

The smartphone as a digital key

Another option is identification via your smartphone. Convenient, because you always carry this personal item with you. Extra advantage: your car does not have to store any info, it can simply be stored on your smartphone.

Identifying yourself with your smartphone is also smart when several people use your lease car. This system will undoubtedly be introduced in the future by car sharing or carpool systems. As soon as the car connects to your smartphone, you will immediately feel at home in the car.

It will be some time before this technology is introduced as a general feature. Although service providers already use the smartphone trigger to some extent by in combination with, for example, car sharing apps, it still has to reach its real potential. For this to happen, all car manufacturers should first agree on a common, standardised system.

You are the key.

Speaking of personal settings, what is even more personal than your face? Probably nothing. Biometrics or facial recognition is therefore an intelligent solution for identifying yourself in your car. If your car recognises you – by the shape of your face, your iris or your fingerprint for example – a key or other trigger is no longer needed. This technology has been around for a long time and is no longer featured only in science fiction films. Unfortunately, it is a pricey option and the car needs advanced electronics. So it will take some time before it is fully integrated into your lease car. Even if it is no longer a distant dream ...

One more step

As you can see, current technology has come far and offers an awful lot of possibilities. Therefore, using facial recognition systems only to adjust your chair would be a shame. In combination with AI (artificial intelligence), we can drastically change and, above all, improve our driving experience. Recognising a face is one thing, identifying emotions and expressions is another. When this becomes possible, a car can really anticipate your needs and intervene to improve your comfort and safety. This makes it possible to adjust the lighting for more alertness, set up your favourite music for less stress or adjust the heating to your body temperature.

Once cars become truly autonomous, personalisation becomes the most normal thing in the world. And let’s be honest: a car that can match a personal butler sounds appealing, doesn't it?