Connected car startups raked in over $1 billion in funding last year, even though most consumers have yet to hear the term, connected car. With more than 1,700 autotech startups now in the game, competition is ramping up at all levels of the automotive IoT ecosystem. From automotive cyber security solutions providers to connected head-up display companies, new autotechs are coming online almost daily. Growth and sustainability of the connected car market demands a symbiotic relationship between automakers and 3rd-party tech providers.Without major automakers, there is no market for autotech products. With 250 million connected vehicles projected to be on the road by 2020, there's plenty of opportunity for automakers, and for the connected car startup.

With cars becoming more connected and autonomous, cybersecurity is a constant worry for automakers. They dread the likelihood of intrusions into the connected car from hackers, terrorists, extortionists, and thieves (see "Your Future Self-Driving Car Will Be Way More Hackable")--not to mention the random 12-year-old with mischief in mind. Apprehensions about automotive cybersecurity came to a head when a pair of white-hat hackers broke into a Jeep Cherokee in 2015, leading to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles by Chrysler Fiat to fix a software bug in the Uconnect infotainment system (see "Carmakers Accelerate Security Efforts after Hacking Stunts"). Cars represent a fundamentally different sort of security challenge from laptops, servers, or mobile phones, in which corruption or theft of data is the hacker's objective. A cyber-attack on a moving vehicle may create a deadly safety hazard, and conventional antihacking software could be too slow or ineffective to avert an incident.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - European self-driving car company Vedecom Tech and Israel's Karamba Security said on Monday they are partnering in developing fully autonomous cars that will be deployed for limited use in certain European cities within the coming year.