The Software-Defined Vehicle

Chapter 2. What the Automotive Industry Can Learn from Other Industries

In Chapter 1, we explored the vision for the modern automotive software realm, diving deep into the concept of a “smartphone habitat on wheels” and addressing the unique challenges and opportunities it introduces. We’ve demonstrated the imperative to innovate at a rapid pace and the complexities of ensuring functional safety in this hybrid landscape.

Now we shift our focus to the foundational concepts and technologies that underpin this vision. We will take a look at what made the smartphone and internet revolution successful and how we can apply these lessons to the SDV.

Learning from the Smartphone Folks: Standardization, Hardware Abstraction, and App Stores

Nokia’s journey into the mobile world offers a significant lesson for the SDV. By 2009, Nokia had created a maze with 57 different and incompatible versions of its operating system. The consequences were devastating. For developers, it became a daunting task to create apps because of the vast fragmentation. For users, the resultant limited application ecosystem made Nokia’s platform less attractive.

This tale mirrors a current challenge in the automotive world. Today, almost every car model, even those from a single manufacturer, employs custom hardware and software components sourced from various suppliers. The result: extreme fragmentation combined with monolithic programming frameworks, where creating a “vehicle app” that can run across multiple ...