Samsung will soon let you control smart home devices from your car’s dashboard

Your car might just become the new smart home hub for your house. Samsung has expanded SmartThings integration, enabling drivers to control their smart home devices directly from their car’s infotainment system. It’s called Car-to-Home. 

Building on the earlier Home-to-Car capability that allowed users to monitor their cars from inside the house, the Car-to-Home feature flips the functionality so you can control your smart home appliances, such as air conditioners, lighting systems, and other smart switches, from your car’s dashboard. 

What can the Car-to-Home feature do?

The practical scope of the feature is broader than it might sound, as it is compatible with devices such as air conditioners, air purifiers, robot vacuums, lights, and cameras. Connecting is straightforward — drivers scan a QR code displayed on their car’s infotainment screen and link their vehicle to their SmartThings account. 

Apart from manual control (flipping the switches), the Car-to-Home feature unlocks location-aware automation that genuinely changes how your home responds to your day. You can set routines so that the SmartThings network turns on the required appliances as you park your car in the garage.

I can see people using the feature to pre-cool their rooms or run air purifiers before they arrive home after a tiring day at the office. On the contrary, the feature should also shut everything down (automatically), as you get in the car and leave the driveway. There’s a dedicated Away Mode for handling lights when you’re away. 

Who gets access, and when?

For now, the feature is available on select Hyundai and Kia cars, specifically those that feature the connected car Navigation Cockpit (ccNC) introduced after November 2022 in Korea. However, both Samsung and Hyundai aim to expand the feature to their customers throughout the world in due course. 

Eligible models include the Grandeur, Santa Fe, Ioniq 5, K5, Sorento, and EV9. Samsung also plans to extend the feature to Genesis vehicles equipped with the ccIC27 infotainment system. 

As and when the feature becomes available to a wider audience, it could drive a behavioral shift in which cars become central nodes in someone’s smart home ecosystem, linking mobility and domestic technology in ways that were, until recently, purely speculative.