ACO Tech has officially announced its partnership with Spotify which allows the company to integrate the massively popular music streaming service into its ATLAS automotive operating system. In fact, the company also said that Spotify will come pre-loaded on ATLAS Infotainment Head Unit (IHU) inside Proton vehicles soon.
The company noted that both free and premium Spotify users are able to utilize the service on ATLAS IHU. However, the exact vehicle models were not revealed in today’s announcement although the company did say that such IHU will be running on Android 8.0 or newer and the rollout will be taking place sometime in the third quarter of this year.
For those who are unfamiliar with ACO Tech, the company was established back in 2019 as a joint venture between Proton Edar, ECARX, and Altel Communications. This may explain why ATLAS-based IHU can only be seen on Proton cars so far even though the company welcomes any automakers to utilize its operating system.
In addition to that, ECARX itself was co-founded by Eric Li, the Chairman of Geely who is the co-parent company of Proton. Not only that, Geely also invested USD50 million into ECARX last year.
During its early days, ACO Tech’s primary task is to make Geely’s Global Key User Interface (GKUI) inside the Proton X70 and X50 more friendly for Malaysian consumers. Nowadays, the company is also looking into implementing the ATLAS Pay in-car payment system by the fourth quarter of 2022 through a collaboration with UOB Malaysia and Fasspay.
They are also working together with FIVE Petroleum Malaysia although the scope of this partnership is a little bit vague. From what we were made to understand, it will be involving fuelling experience as well as automotive-related support including service providers and merchants but no actual timeline was mentioned when the partnership was revealed last month.
