When Bruce Wayne rolled up to his Bat Cave, a roadblock dropped automatically, the camouflaged garage door swung open, the lights flickered on, and Alfred was already standing by.
It has been 50 years since that vision of Batman in his tricked-out Lincoln Futura appeared on TV. But now automakers, communications companies and technology companies want to turn every car into an interconnected Batmobile.
“The car is going to become another node in the internet of things,” said Kamyar Moinzadeh, chief executive of Airbiquity, a Seattle software and engineering company specializing in vehicle tracking and telematics.
There are already plenty of examples of car communications, whether it's General Motor's 20-year-old OnStar system or Tesla's expanding ability to monitor its vehicles remotely and even download entirely new software operating systems.
But cars more fully integrated into so-called internet of things - everyday devices able both to send and receive data - could become more of a seamless piece of the daily digital fabric of people's lives.
Even now, Amazon's voice-activated home assistant, Alexa, can order up an Uber ride or find out how much gas is in a car's tank while the driver is still in the house.
BMW announced this month that its Connected services would enable Alewa owners to lock the car doors and check car battery levels from the comfort of their sofas.
Ford Motor plans to introduce Alexa integration into vehicles, including the Escape and Fusion, before the end of this year, said James A. Buczkowski, who oversees advanced engineering at Ford.
“Your spouse could add things to the shopping list, which your car would alert you to,” Mr. Buczkowski said. The updated list could then automatically tip off the car's navigation system about where to pick up the last-minute item.
The first generation of connected systems like G.M.'s OnStar were focused on helping drivers when they were lost or their cars broke down, and the second generation has been about connecting the dashboard to smartphones for streaming live traffic information or audio services like Pandora, said Mr. Moinzadeh at Airbiquity.
The next generation, he said, will focus on managing our entire digital lives, aided by semiautonomous systems that assume more responsibility for actual driving tasks.
“Once we get to the world of autonomous driving, these cars are not going to be about horsepower but about the in-vehicle experience and how it's connected to your lifestyle,” Mr. Moinzadeh said. “The car will talk to all your connected things, whether it's your refrigerator or your home security system.”
Mercedes-Benz is among the automakers intent on integrating cars more fully into the mobile communications network, without waiting to peg it to autonomous driving.
“The car is developing into a quality-time machine,” Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of Daimler, the parent of Mercedes-Benz, said last month at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.
Next year, Mr. Zetsche said, the company's In Car Office services will automatically connect drivers to scheduled conference calls and navigate to appointments based on calendar entries.
Other industry executives see potential health and safety applications.
“In health care, it's about monitoring people and how they are behaving,”said Bret Greenstein, vice president for the Watson internet-of-things artificial intelligence division at IBM.
Driver attentiveness can be assessed by a combination of sensors in the car, including acoustic monitors, eye trackers and wearable devices, Mr.Greenstein said.
Brain waves and heart rates can indicate stress, according to Mr.Buczkowski of Ford. Such signals might then tell the car to block incoming calls or switch the audio system from AC/DC to Yanni.
The welter of onboard sensors, Mr.Buczkowski said, could turn the car into a four-wheeled digital stethoscope that compiles a continuous record of your condition, generating a more accurate assessment of your health compared with the snapshot of a once-a-year checkup.
Between the digital dreams and the on-road reality, though, there are technological challenges, according to Chris Penrose, who oversees the internet-of-things group at AT&T. The company, he said, is working on such efforts with nearly 20 different auto brands around the world.
But right now, for example, there is no single networking standard for internet-of-things devices, even in the so-called smart home segment. There are multiple wireless systems, including ZigBee and Z-Wave, and no single software platform has taken hold.
“There are multiple gateways into the house now,” said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive technology for the Silicon Valley company Nvidia.
Onboard car systens must have access to the vast amount of information accumulating from all these devices to take advantage fully of the internet of things, Mr.Shapiro said. “But if there is no standard,” he said, “it makes it very difficult.”
Mr. Buczkowski acknowledges the hurdles. Separate and incompatible systems from Google and Amazon might be able to compete or coexist in the home market. But cars operate in the public sphere and will need to share information with traffic systems, parking meters and other cars.
“Vehicles from Ford, G.M., Honda, etc., will all have to talk to each other,” Mr. Buczkowski said. “How do we manage it - and who manage it?”
