What are SW Defined Vehicles?

Every OEM is going after this. Every report and study about the automotive industry mentions SW defined vehicles(SDV) at least 5 times. What is it?

One way to explain an SDV is a vehicle where it's features are mainly enabled through software over it's life time. The key being "over it's life time". Vehicle have had SW defined features for a very long time. But only it manifested as variant configuration or end-of-line parameter setting. In most cases, once these configurations are made before the vehicle leaves the factory, they don't change for the rest of it's life. Now with SDV's we want to achieve a paradigm, where we can do the same thing but over the life of the vehicle. 

This is a major change in how we design, develop and manufacture vehicles. Moving from a hardware centric approach to a software based one. There are multiple reasons why this is happening now:

1. Large number of ECUs with lot of SW and offers larger flexibility in capability. A new way of providing additional value to the user.

2. ECU hardware is becoming more of a commodity and mature at the same time. Less of a differentiating factor.

3. Customers expect a smartphone-like experience.

4. Mature technologies(OS, Hypervisor, App ecosystems etc.) exist today that make the barrier to entry much lower.

Manufacturers will have to embrace a more continuous development rather then fixed-time/fixed-cost projects due for a yearly release. They will have to treat a vehicle that has multiple consumer devices embedded in them that needs improving, maintaining and updating.

Although HW and Low-level software is becoming more and more of a commodity, as SDV's become more and more common it doesn't mean that OEM's can let go of there expertise and knowledge in the hardware and electrical domains. In fact, it's the exact opposite. OEM's that can truly succeed in offering a great SW product will need a more then firm grasp all the way down to the HW and all the layers of software in between.

Going by parallels from the smartphone and laptop world: building hardware and designing software that is tightly integrated with that hardware has always been able to give a superior experience to users. (Smartphone example: Apple iPhone vs. others; Laptop example: Apple Mac vs Windows+3rd party HW). That is probably why, OEMs instead or in addition to partnerships to Tier 1 suppliers now are also partnering with SoC vendors directly. 

A trend that was catching quite some attention is the need for OEMs to build their own SW platforms, for example, VW.os or MB.os. This reminds me of how each android phone vendor built their own "flavour" of android that they ship to users. If you zoom out high enough, the underlying pieces of these SW platforms are more or less the same. These platforms are a combination of off-the-shelf software products and in-house developed software. And if what happened in the android world any indication here: The SW platform with the best interfaces to outside ecosystems and the one with the least bloatware of them all will have a clear advantage over the others.

Source: Volkswagen

Source: Mercedes-Benz

In the next post, I will explain why SW defined vehicles is important for OEMs and how this can manifest in the coming years.