Transformation of cars

The connected car is transforming from a hardware-defined vehicle to a data-defined mobility experience, inside a contextual space that can be personalized and is capable to learn. But what exactly is a data-defined vehicle and how will we start designing this?

Today, vehicles are about, physical appearance, physical engine design, and physical performance, manage and built from bill of materials which has its roots in a hardware oriented manufacturing. Simplified, it is a list of the raw materials, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture a vehicle. Software is considered only embedded in a hierarchical decomposition of the hardware-defined vehicle. Hence, the defined hardware limits capabilities of software. Moreover, data enabling a personalized experience is not considered as the primary overall design aspect of a vehicle.

Challenges of AUTOmobile

The current challenge of the AUTOmobile manufacturers is to build a software-defined vehicle environment. That means the software is designed first and then the hardware requirements will be defined by the software. The goal is to digitally integrate software everywhere into the car after manufacturing, examples of this can be seen with Tesla updating their “autonomous” vehicle over-the-air and BMW and others allowing you to buy apps, music, services, etc to personalize your vehicle. But all is still coming from a hardware oriented thinking how to manage bill of materials and packaging software into AUTOmobile parts.

Now coming back to a data-defined autoMOBILE architecture, what is the major transformational challenge for AUTOmobile manufacturers. What will mobility be with autonomous capabilities? Vehicles will be clearly more about contextual data, personalization and learning then the physical appearance. Designing a vehicle will be more like designing a contextual room for living, working, adventuring, shopping, relaxing, enjoying, etc. Even virtual reality and augmented reality will combine a travel experience with anything you want, e.g. off roading on the way to work. Therefore, just building a high-definition contextual map is not a data-defined autoMOBILE architecture what most AUTOmobile manufacturers and suppliers are thinking today.

Guidelines

Then bill of materials for autoMOBILEs have to specify simultaneously data of devices, spaces and places to enable learnings. The core technical capabilities to build this new kind of bill of materials will be Cognitive, Internet-of-Things and Blockchain. This will create a safe service robot that adopt quickly the accuracy and frequency of data to personalize the service experience by changing software models as secure transactions.

Summary of the Cognitive Vehicle Architecture:

Hardware-Defined: Build a physically safe and reliable AUTOmobile

Software-Defined: Digitally integrate the driving experience and update services during driving

Data-defined: Build a contextual learning space to personalize the autoMOBILE and services at changing places

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