When choosing a car, infotainment technology has become increasingly important over time. Consumers want to enjoy "experiences" in the interior of their cars similar to those offered by home automation, with comforts of various kinds, and automakers are accommodating them with digital assistants and systems that demand ever-higher levels of digitization and personalization. A future is not far off when we will be able to have 360-degree screens and personal audio zones in our cars or choose to have certain features only for a certain period.
As Andy McLean, VP of Automotive Cabin Experience at Analog Devices: "If we look at how our digital experience has changed at home, in the office or, for that matter, in everyday life, we see how this could be replicated in a vehicle as well." Let's put aside the "old" concept of buying a car and choosing the options we most need or, simply, like: we will soon be able to choose to "subscribe" to a super-performance audio system only when we are about to go on a long journey. However, let's talk about software features that will require continuous updates: how much will this affect the capabilities of the hardware implemented in the vehicles? "We talk a lot about software-defined vehicles and the ability to constantly update them, but we also have to take into account the complexity of the hardware," McLean says further. "Computing requirements have increased 7 to 10 times in the last few years as we move from one generation of vehicles to the next. We have the ability to upgrade applications to add new features, but we may have hardware that is perhaps five years old. How can we speed up the hardware development cycle to respond to increasingly complex applications? One option is to have hardware with more processing power than is needed at any given time, so that we then have it ready for other implementations."
Thus, over-the-air updates will become standard as the role of software grows within the vehicle, and the real challenge will be to ensure adherence to the highest levels of accuracy, security and authentication, both in the case of owned vehicles and in the view of shared mobility: the car will have to adapt as quickly as possible to the change in preferences and needs that occurs whenever a different person gets behind the wheel. Ultimately, the final frontier, as McLean concludes is the shift from the paradigm in which "the driver controls the vehicle," to one in which "the vehicle adapts to the driver."
You might also be interested in:
Automotive: straight to the goal
