What's the point of Software Defined Vehicles?

🚗Software defined vehicles have become an umbrella term for the growing role of software in today's vehicles. And every OEM has listed it as one of their top goals for the coming years. But what's the whole point of it?

🚗 Tesla, who is among the OEMs at the forefront of this transformation, recently had to 'recall' 1 million vehicles. And how did Tesla solve that. They sent out a new SW update. None of the cars were required to visit a dealership. No customer was required to pay any additional amount. Tesla didn't have to spent tons of money doing recall campaigns to get the issue fixed.

🚗 This kind of recall fix is pretty new to the automotive industry. And is one of the main goals of being able to build software-defined vehicles.

🚗The key point here is that there is sufficient decoupling between the hardware and software that a fix to an issue is sufficiently done by "just" updating the software. It goes without saying, that if the fault was actually in the hardware, then Tesla, like any other OEM, would have had to do a full scale physical recall. Not very ideal.

This is just one of the many goals of building a software-defined vehicle.