• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, February 9, 2017

Along with connected cars comes in-car entertainment.

More and better screens in the driver console as well as for rear-seat passengers and greater availability of in-car connectivity and Wi-Fi services will be pushing the market along, based on a new study.

The global in-car entertainment hardware market will reach $36 billion by 2021, an increase from $16 billion last year, according to the connected car report from Futuresource Consulting.

The growth will be aided by the development and adoption of Apple CarPlay and Google/Android Auto, according to the study.

This is hardly explosive growth, in relation to the dramatic increases projected in other aspects of the Internet of Things.

Connected cars will grow from 30 million globally at the end of last year to more than 200 million by 2020, according to Futuresource, which projects that autonomous driving will not have a significant impact through 2020.

Futuresource expects autonomous vehicles to reach the consumer market by 2020, accounting for the production of 10% of all vehicles, but not until 2035.

Of course, there are the capabilities coming inside connected cars and then there is the issue of how much of those features will actually be used by the people in those cars.

Another new study suggests that many of those in-car screens will be relatively unused.

While in-car browsing may be cool in concept, it’s rarely used, according to a study by Drawbridge, a company that serves ads to in-car screens.

Over a one-month period, the company identified that 39,000 Tesla owners used their Web browser, hardly a majority of the 150,000 total Model S and Model X cars on the road. Over a seven-day period, that figure shrinks to 6,000.

When the browser is opened, it puts out requests for ads and the Drawbridge system then serves the browser with an ad relevant to the person. As a result, Drawbridge can tell when a browser is opened.

The total number of ad requests for Tesla screens was 1.5 million over seven days, coming to 36 ad requests per day per active browser. Translated, this means that a minority of owners are using the browser, but those who do are using it a lot.

In terms of content requested by people inside cars, the majority accessed news content. Here are the types of content requested, based on the type of ad request:

• 56% -- News content (40% national, 25% local, 22% international)
• 23% -- Sports-related content
• 18% -- Food and drink
• 17% -- Shopping
• 14% -- Travel
• 10% -- Real estate

The capabilities for in-car entertainment are being built, in hopes that consumer behavior will follow.