  In recent years, numerous vehicular technologies, e.g., cruise control and
steering assistant, have been proposed and deployed to improve the driving
experience, passenger safety, and vehicle performance. Despite the existence of
several novel vehicular applications in the literature, there still exists a
significant gap between resources needed for a variety of vehicular (in
particular, data-dominant, latency-sensitive, and computationally-heavy)
applications and the capabilities of already-in-market vehicles. To address
this gap, different smartphone-/Cloud-based approaches have been proposed that
utilize the external computational/storage resources to enable new
applications. However, their acceptance and application domain are still very
limited due to programability, wireless connectivity, and performance
limitations, along with several security/privacy concerns. In this paper, we
present a novel architecture that can potentially enable rapid development of
various vehicular applications while addressing shortcomings of
smartphone-/Cloud-based approaches. The architecture is formed around a core
component, called SmartCore, a privacy/security-friendly programmable dongle
that brings general-purpose computational and storage resources to the vehicle
and hosts in-vehicle applications. Based on the proposed architecture, we
develop an application development framework for vehicles, that we call
ProCMotive. ProCMotive enables developers to build customized vehicular
applications along the Cloud-to-edge continuum, i.e., different functions of an
application can be distributed across SmartCore, the user's personal devices,
and the Cloud. To highlight potential benefits that the framework provides, we
design and develop two different vehicular applications based on ProCMotive,
namely, Amber Response and Insurance Monitor.
